


This is the Life that Goes Godlessly On

by Goodknight



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Drug Use, Family Drama, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Long-suffering, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Graphic Smut, Religion, Russian Mafia, Wild Ride, mundane AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 04:48:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15332124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goodknight/pseuds/Goodknight
Summary: It occurred to me that Mello had issues – an inferiority complex, a control thing, something psychosomatic. I hoped, and would continue to hope for a few wild months in 2008, that he and I were going to do despicable things together and then go out in a blaze of glory. I don’t know why I wanted that. It was crazy to want it; I don’t want it anymore.





	This is the Life that Goes Godlessly On

**Author's Note:**

> The 2k word story that really got away... :X 'It's still just a one-shot... it's just a one-shot' has been my mantra all week. Thank you [RZKing](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RZKing/profile) for being the most wonderful listener, as always. Happy reading, friends.

There was a time when you could get a pretty good burger and a plate of thick cut fries for cheap at a place called Sonny’s, just down the road from the Grace Community Church, and I’d be the one to hand it to you. Then if you kept walking past the church and towards the sunrise, you’d end up in suburbia – a suburbia full of ugly stone sons-of-bitches with arches and neat lawns. If you went towards the sunset, into the city, you got strip malls and Walmart. In-between was Mello and I’s family homes, two old character houses, separated by a couple blocks of creeping gentrification.

 

Right, so, I lived in two stories of what anyone would call a shit-hole (once they got past the relatively cool antique front door and saw the dishes stacked inside) with some extended family members anyone would call assholes and a blissful lack of self-awareness until I was about 8, and then I met Mello at Sonny’s, briefly, where he loudly asked why I’d come to a restaurant without washing my shirt first, and I realised that other people thought I was trashy. I don’t know if he remembers that we met in Sonny’s when we were 8. I remember it because it was the first time I’d been bullied – if you could call it that, which you really can’t, it was so brief and unimportant – for the neglectful way whoever was supposed to be raising me (jury is out on that one) cared for my appearance. Anway, it doesn’t matter, but it bothered me enough that I remembered Mello and his white church clothes forever. He was like a Holy light in the Sonny’s, eating a soft serve in a red booth next to his angelic blonde mother, swinging his feet hard into the table legs so they went _bang._

 

I went home and grew up a bit over the years after that, boarded up behind my bedroom door: a young hermit in training. Mello and I were in different catchment areas, since his house bordered the strata and mine crouched in the greasy loom of a mysteriously unmarked box that I now know to be a strip club, perfectly nestled in the bundle of area codes that shipped off to Hill County Junior and Senior Highschool in thick yellow daily schoolbuses, meaning I never saw him again until much later, even though we were walking distance from one another all those years.

 

Here’s how his highschool years went, in case it matters: he kept one hand up and the other in a fist, barely escaped expulsion after an incident involving a Power Ranger, a fourth storey window, and a Calculus exam result that wasn’t 11/10 or something, and then tromped out believing with weird intensity that he should have been valedictorian.

 

Mu experience was hugely different because no one in my school played with Power Rangers, we had no fourth floor, and I dropped out before ever taking a Calculus course to focus on Dota2 and collect Sprite bottles under the desk in my bedroom, a pursuit which made me a cool £28 when I finally took them to the Bottle Depot. Before then, I was doing real well. Maybe I would have been valedictorian of my crummy school, and wouldn’t that have pissed him off? But I dropped out, so it’s irrelevant whether I was any good at factorals or getting my calculator to say ‘boobies’. I got pretty fucking good at a lot of other shit. Real world skills. Like being lonely for days. Take that to the bank.

 

I was still living with my family, technically, when I met Mello again at the Sonny’s. I was also technically living alone, since the aunt who had custody of me had moved into her boyfriend’s apartment a few years ago, leaving all her shit behind; one of my cousins smashed his truck, which was full of heroin, into a convienence store window and went to jail; and my other cousin moved into the basement when I was 12 and only used the downstairs door and was never to be seen in the living room again.

 

Mello was still living at home, too, practising Catholicism with his mum. He’d had a dog growing up, but it had died when he was 17. They also had an aquariam. I always thought pet ownership and a clean house, when seen together, was the peak of wealth.

 

It was a Sunday when we met again, the summer of graduation. He’d gone to church alone, he told me, because his mother was out of town.

 

‘And you still went?’ I asked, punching in his order. I worked at Sonny’s because, like I said, everyone who might have worked to support and feed me had fucked off years ago. I started two months after I dropped out of 10th grade, so I could buy Sprite and smokes and cereal and milk and eggs and shit. ‘That’s responsible of you.’

 

Mello’s eyes always glared. It didn’t matter what mood he was in. He glared. It was chilling, and invigorating, to be looked at like you were the only thing in the world to him at that moment, and he hated you with divine strength and perfect clarity. His mouth was smiling, though - sardonic. He was wearing black. ‘I like the community.’ He said, in a voice smooth and low and long like a bottomless cavern in a deep dark sea.

 

‘Don’t think I could handle all the rules. Thou shalt not sin, and whatever.’

 

‘Mm. Sinning is human.’

 

‘It’s not Christian.’

 

‘It’s human.’

 

He dropped a ten pence coin in the tip jar on the counter. He had very neat hair, that day, like a curtain of sun around his chilly face. This is going to sound dumb as dirt, but I swear I already knew he was some sort of devil. I mean that, of course, in the most loving and respectful way. But I wouldn’t have started fancying him if I hadn’t thought there was something gritty in his chest, something that we had in common.

 

I walked home after my shift in a hazy hush, scuffing my threadbare shoes along the dry sidewalk, wondering if we had made an impression on each other. I could picture the way his lips curled off his perfect straight teeth in exact detail. I liked to think that I understood the meaning behind the loose rosary hanging from what I fantasised to be an excitingly hypocritical throat – at once blasphemous and pious, praying at the pulpit and questioning everything aloud at the dinner table. Mello sat at the centre of my imagination, glaring out from among a congregation of sheep, a snake with dark shifting scales and flickering pink tongue and blue, blue eyes.

 

How would I have imprinted, if I had made a dent at all, on his mind? A sloppy freckled burger-slinger in an unwashed striped shirt, bagged eyes and sticky fingers and sharp elbows and all that? One of the most frustrating things about other people is that it’s impossible to know what they really think of you.

 

I did laundry when I got home. Then smoked a cigarette on the couch in the fading sun, watching Terminator, which was what I did every night, and had done every night for a while. Not watching Terminator, necessarily, but sitting around with a cigarette feeling introspective and stupid at the same time.

 

Nothing interesting happened to me until I saw Mello again – and I mean that: my life is boring as shit. I’m not so delusional as to assert that kill streaks in Call of Duty or whatever are actually significant to anyone except myself at 2 in the morning. I was being a good little cog in the machine, really – born to be a mouthy minimum wage slave and to die of lung cancer, like my Dad. Nothing wrong with that.

 

But I was wiping a table and he came in through the door, looked at me like I was a white canvas in an empty photo frame, and then snapped his head around to order a coffee, black. He was alone, and it was Sunday again. I thought it was a bit odd that I’d worked at Sonny’s for a couple boring years and never seen him, and now he was showing up like a regular after church with his cross flapping against his sternum, watching the traffic outside the window while he waited for his drink.

 

So Mello was in Sonny’s and I was in Sonny’s. I started swishing my cloth around on the counter, opposite where Mello was waiting, with my head down. Flirting, obviously.

 

‘I think you’re making it worse.’ He said, which made me jerk my head up like a startled ostrich.

 

‘You an expert?’

 

‘You’re not.’

 

‘Course not. I work here.’

 

Mello had such white, white scleras. It was uncanny. And when he smiled it was like someone was pulling back a wrapper from a neat line of gum. Very weird. ‘Were you demoted from the register?’

 

‘Huh?’

 

‘You took my order last week. Now you’re a busboy.’

 

‘It’s a slow day, only one till’s open.’ It was a stilted, dry conversation; all my spit congealed in my throat.

 

‘What’s your name?’ He asked, off-handedly. His coffee had been put on the counter in front of him, and my co-worker, Linda, had wandered away.

 

‘I’m wearing a name tag.’

 

‘Well I obviously can’t fucking read it from here, can I?’

 

All that spit. In my throat. ‘Matt.’

 

‘I’m Mello.’

 

‘Ok.’

 

He took his coffee and left.

 

It’s polite to say ‘nice meeting you’ or ‘have a good day’, especially if you work at a restaurant chain. I’ve never been able to say anything like that to anyone, for any reason, in any situation, literally ever.

 

‘Have a good one!’ Linda called from behind the counter, while the bells chimed above Mello’s head.

 

The door slammed.

 

‘You might want to rinse that rag, Matt.’ Linda said. ‘It’s dirtier than the counter.’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

I was scheduled to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday the next week, so I swapped my Thursday with someone for the Sunday and spent it sleeping with a pillow over my head and a hand in my pants. Saturday dragged. Sunday was worse. I wanted Mello to come through the door so I could hammer his order into my machine, and then he would say ‘you didn’t ask if I wanted sugar or cream’ and I would say ‘I know you don’t’. That was as far as the fantasy went; I’m not a bloody novelist, I don’t do dialogue.

 

But he didn’t come. I was real mopey about it, until my shift ended and Linda stopped me before I could shrug my coat on.

 

‘Your friend asked about your schedule.’ She said.

 

I didn’t have anything to say about that, yet, because I didn’t have any friends and was confused about her wording.

 

‘I hope you don’t mind that I told him when you were working.’ She went on, after an unaturally long pause.

 

‘Told who what?’

 

‘Your friend. I told him your schedule this week.’ Linda said. ‘I really hope you don’t mind.’

 

Slow on the uptake, but I got it now. ‘You told Mello when I’d be working.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘Did you tell him I switched?’

 

‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t know you had until this morning.’

 

‘Huh.’

 

Linda was always smiling when she spoke to me. She didn’t do that with other people. I think she did it with me because I’m such a rotten conversationalist, she felt like she had to force something into our interactions just to make them bearable for herself, and maybe to try and make me feel less awkward. I don’t know why people always seem to think I’m feeling awkward.

 

‘I should’ve asked you before I said anything.’ Linda went on, straightening the menus on the counter, a nervous thing. ‘I mean, why wouldn’t he just ask you? Sorry.’

 

‘No, that’s... fine. Thanks, actually.’ I tucked my hands into the pockets of my coat. It was overcast, a July cold snap. I hate cold.

 

‘Good, then. Have a nice night, Matt. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

 

‘Ok.’

 

My jeans were soaked through when I got in, so I stripped them and draped them over the back of the sofa to dry. Mello had come into the restaurant and asked if I’d been in on Sunday, and Linda had said no, so he hadn’t come.

 

Waiting for him to come to Sonny’s over the two weeks that followd kept my blood up through my daily slog. I told him one day that I was going to be taking a break in about 10 minutes to have a smoke behind the restaurant, and he was there when I slipped out the back door into a grey afternoon, cigarette already hanging out the side of my mouth. As soon as I lit up, he let me know that I was stinking up the air and killing myself, and I told him to fuck off if he was so sensitive about it. It was like love at first sight. We liked each other even when we were unlikeable. I know that sounds dumb as rocks, by hey. That’s what I thought.

 

I leant up against the wall of Sonny’s and he stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets and a stance that was agressively wide. He told me later in a quiet nostalgic moment that he had been wondering why I was always staring at him like I was looking down the barrel of a gun, and if it was because I was attracted to him, was I some sort of masochist or what?, but he didn’t say it quite like that, then. Instead he said: ‘Was there something you wanted to say to me?’

 

I was trying to learn how to blow smoke rings. I’d been trying for two years, ever since I started smoking. I never figured it out and stopped trying later that year, partially because Mello told me that struggle in the face of certain failure was a bad look for me and I should quit. I think he meant that I should quit smoking entirely, since it annoyed the shit out of him for some reason, but I didn’t take his advice that far. So, anyway, I tried to blow some smoke rings instead of answering his question, because it was such an uncomfortable thing to ask and I didn’t know what to say.

 

‘Because if we’re just going to stand here getting lung cancer, I might go back inside.’ Mello continued without inflection, without moving an inch.

 

‘That’s all I usually do.’ I mumbled, shrugging up to my ears.

 

Mello sighed with haughty, amused exasperation. I don’t understand to this day what he thought he was going to get out of all this. ‘Well, if you think of something, why don’t you call me and let me know?’

 

What I was thinking was, _oh, smooth._

 

He put his hand out, silently asking for my phone. I stared at it. Rolled my tongue. Took a drag. No smoke rings.

 

‘I only have a landline.’ I said after a stupid, too-long silence during which Mello’s eyes smoldered impatiently. ‘There are pens inside.’

 

Mello’s arm dropped back to his side. He seemed unmoored, like I’d derailed his script.

 

I went back in through the kitchen door and he walked around to the front, and then he wrote his number on my arm while an old woman tried to get my attention by waving a napkin at me.

 

‘Cool.’ I said, when he’d finished. I had the superbly crazy thought that I would like to tattoo that phone number where it was so I would never forget it, and always carry it with me like a serial killer with a weird trophy. Completely insane. ‘Yeah, one second,’ I said to the old woman, ‘what do you want?’

 

‘I would like a raspberry scone.’ She told me.

 

Mello faded towards the door. He was wearing a heavy felt coat that made him look like a funeral with a halo.

 

I called him the next day, after I got home from work. The landline hung on the kitchen wall and had a cord long enough to reach into the hallway, where I sat with my back against the stairs, an accordian of bumps on my spine. We talked on the phone while the shadows slid over my knees. I don’t remember how we filled those hours; they seem impossible now. It was a dense, muggy summer for me. I hadn’t known there were enough words inside me to fill up a conversation, hadn’t known I had the patience to sit on the floor and listen to someone tell me about God and the Valedictorian speech and shit that only mattered to me because it mattered to someone who mattered.

 

The summer before that one, I had been living in the exact same way except I had been alone, and I had thought I liked that very much. But it was so much better to be with Mello. So much better that I can’t imagine how I would ever go back to being alone. I don’t know who I would be if I were alone, other than nothing and no-one. There is a seam where my life by myself and my life with Mello is stitched together, but it is blurry to me. The past stretches away behind me like a rolling hill. I’m not walking backwards, so who gives a fuck what it was like there?

 

Basically, once I had Mello, I had him. He came in on Sunday and we went into the alley to bicker about my smoking and so he could analyse the sermon with someone who didn’t care whether God was a bearded guy shitting on a cloud or an outdated societal crutch that upheld ancient bigotries or whatever.

He had a brilliant memory for the Bible. Anyone who wasn’t fooling around with him would have thought him pious – so, obviously, I never did, because we started fooling around right away without much preamble.

 

‘Going to church might be the most frightening thing some of these people ever do.’ Mello said a few weeks after we’d struck up the routine, while I started a second cigarette, hoping I had enough time to finish it before I had to go back into work.

 

‘Hellfire and brimstone,’ I mused, ‘or the hard pews on their asses? Which is worse?’

 

Mello ran his tongue over his teeth. He’d been drinking hot coffee and it was scorching outside, one of the very few days it was hot all year. It never seemed to bother him, though. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of... religious doctrine as moral bondage. _Everyone who commits a sin is a slave of sin_ ; Jesus admits it. A mother fears the sins of her son, because the preacher tells her she should.’

 

‘Bondage, huh? Kinky.’

 

He looked right at me, a little quirk in his pink lips. ‘For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines.’

 

I chuckled, stomping my butt under my boot. ‘I better go. I’ll call you. You can tell me more about this... bondage stuff.’

 

‘I will.’

 

We had a lot of conversations that were basically the same as that one. Mello liked Old Testament violence, angels with terrifying faces, crime and punishment and damnation and, like, where’s the soul? What is it? Is it evil? That shit. He usually used mothers and sons when he needed real life examples for everyday sins, fogiveness, holiness, prayer – it was transparent as shit, so I started wondering what his home life was like, and was his mum nice or did he hate her?

 

Then, in July, Mello bought a motorcycle and drove it into the alley to show off, which was a great help in getting us out of that alley and doing more interesting shit with our lives.

 

‘Bloody Hell.’ I said when he drove up to the back door of Sonny’s for the first time, looking like a Hell’s Angel. ‘I don’t think you can park that here.’

 

He rested with his heels dug into the dirt and his helmet under his arm, a big cross belt resting against the flesh under his shirt where it rode up. ‘Does it matter?’ he said offhandedly. ‘Get on.’

 

‘I’m on break.’

 

‘Getting on won’t change that.’

 

I shrugged and jumped down the stoop. He handed me the helmet, so his excessive hair blew in my face while we circled the block aimlessly until my time was up.

 

‘Cool.’ I said into his nape when I’d climbed off the bike back at Sonny’s. ‘I was worried you couldn’t actually drive that thing.’

 

He just stared at me. ‘Do you walk home when your shift ends?’

 

‘Yeah, why?’

 

‘I can give you a ride.’

 

I took a moment to weigh the cost benefit of having him at my shitty house, and ultimately decided I didn’t give a fuck, and shrugged. ‘I’m off at 6.’

 

Mello nodded. ‘I can bring something over.’

 

‘...Sure.’

 

I waved at his back when he rumbled away. It wasn’t the first time he’d brought lunch or dinner or both to the alley so we could sit with our backs on the brick and I could try his mum’s leftover chili or the cucumbr sandwhiches and eclairs they’d had at the church reception or whatever.

 

His motorcycle was pretty sick – by the time we parked on the curb in front of my faded lawn, I’d gotten more than used to the idea of him being some sort of biker dude. It gave him new depth – I didn’t know him super well yet, so that was good. Mello followed me up the footpath to the front door with a reusable grocery bag full of lasagna and forks in his fist, face always so stony you couldn’t tell if he was pissed or bored or what.

 

‘Mi casa es su casa.’ I muttered when I’d thrown the door open. It was grey in the short hallway, and dark in the livingroom because the curtains on the sliding glass door were tightly closed. A good word for my place at 18.30 on a weekday is ‘gloomy as shit’, which is three words but very accurate.

 

Mello removed his boots while I turrned the corner into the kitchen and slapped the lights on.

 

‘Oven’s self explanatory.’ I said. ‘There’s some coke in the fridge.’

 

Mello put the lasagna in, and poured us both a glass of water. He never drank sugary stuff. Kinda hypocritical, considering how many candy bars he goes through daily.

 

‘When is your family coming home?’ He asked, looking me dead in the eye like he always did, like someone had given him the same stern lecture on eye contact my 5th grade teacher had given me during a detention but he had actually taken it to heart.

 

‘Uh...’ I said, and shrugged up to my ears. ‘Not any time soon, I guess.’

 

It was like being in an isolation chamber, being in the flourescent kitchen with his blue eye contact and his red rosary and his neat yellow hair. He was wearing very clean white athletic socks. I only mopped the floor he was standing on when I’d spilled something catastrophic on it, like a bowl of rice or something, so it was hellishly dirty.

 

‘Why dontcha give me a tour?’ He asked.

 

‘Yeah.’

 

I honestly still wonder to this day – and it’s been like 4 years since all this – if he widens his eyes on purpose. Going for the crazy bug look.

 

I showed him the door to the basement where my cousin was squirreled away and told him not to open the door. ‘It’s probably not time to meet the ‘rents, anyway.’ I joked under my breath when we’d turned away, instantly regreting it because it wasn’t a great joke (my cousin is not my parent) and because it implied there was someting between us that made meeting parents significant, and also made it seem like I gave a shit about that sort of thing if there was, and for a second I was also mortified that he’d actually want to meet my family and I’d have to tell him not to bother and would that offend him? But then I turned around and saw that he was smirking.

 

‘You’ll need to give my Mother a few days notice, at least, so she can power wash the house and cook 9 courses.’

 

I swallowed. ‘Okay. Uh. Living room, where I spend most of my time.’

 

‘Doesn’t surprise me. It smells shittier than the rest of the house.’

 

‘Uhuh. I don’t smoke inside, so no it doesn’t.’ A lie. I smoked with my head half out of the window, though, because I was at least half decent. It probaly did still smell, I wouldn’t know.

 

We climbed the stairs, creaking. There were three bedrooms, two of which I never touched. They belogned to people who might come back. ‘And this is my bed.’

 

‘It’s worse than the livingroom.’

 

My room was plain – pale blue sheets (unwashed), brown curtains (sun-bleached), desktop computer on the dresser (clothes accesible, but barely), a no parking sign hammered into a blank grey wall. It was probably about the same as the living room, atmospherically speaking. ‘Hey, that hurts my feelings a bit. I’m gonna need to light up, right now. Make myself feel better.’

 

Mello put his hand on my lower back. ‘Don’t.’

 

‘What are you going to do about it?’ I didn’t have a match or a cigarette, so no preventative action was actually needed on his part. I tried not to smoke in his face too much because he genuinely hates it, and sometimes gets legitimately angry.

 

‘What were you hoping I’d do?’

 

‘Is this supposed to be dirty talk or something?’

 

He kissed me, crowding the doorway, so it must have been. He had been my first kiss, a couple weeks ago. I never told him that. He still doesn’t know that; I’ve never loved anyone else and I mean that. Anyway, I was thinking, God I hope the lasagna doesn’t burn, because I’m so fucking hungry. Also, I cut my nails in the bed a couple times and I didn’t want him to call me gross, so I didn’t want to go there.

 

‘Hardly.’ He said, breathing on my cheeks.

 

‘Why don’t we do this near the oven?’ I asked.

 

‘You’re not fucking serious.’

 

‘You think your mum would like it if you burnt her lasagna?’

 

‘I don’t think anyone would fuckin’ tell her. Do you, Matt? Do you think she’s gonna know that her son was too busy fuckin’ a dude to re-heat her lasagna? It won’t burn, anyway, because you won’t last that long.’ Bug-eyes – he always had bug-eyes and a low, demanding voice, like a bad cop in an interogation. He could make me feel criminal in a way commiting actual crimes never did.

 

I swallowed a wad of congealed spit, feeling a bit thrilled. ‘I know your home number so I could like call her.’

 

Mello blinked very deliberately. ‘Shut the fuck about about my Mother, Matt. I’m trying to have an erection.’

 

‘Sorry.’

 

I started wondering why he was here, in my ugly bedroom with one hand under my shirt pressing on my ribs and the other tugging on my jeans until they just fell loosely to the carpet, and I haven’t stopped wondering why, but in a more general sense. Like, why is he with me? I don’t know that I would bother with me, if I were him. And on top of that I was still pretty concerned about the lasagna.

 

He jerked me off against the wall, since I kept planting my feet so we couldn’t get to the bed, quickly like he was annoyed. I tried to make up for being weird by dropping to my knees and sucking him off, and after about a minute the oven timer went off, so I was like, perfect, now I’m really proving that I’m not hung up about his mum and her dumb lasagna.

 

I was psyching myself up to eat burnt cheese, but it didn’t burn and Mello was right, I was a dumbass to let lasagna get between my dick and an orgasm. We watched Top Gun on the couch while we ate, Mello still in a pissy mood because he has no sense of humour and no capacity for forgiveness and me awkward because I wanted him to get over it and stop being a bitch.

 

‘It’s good.’ I said over Tom Cruise, mouth still full.

 

‘At least my Mother will like you.’ Mello said flatly. ‘She also has her priorities out of order.’

 

‘Uhuh.’

 

Mello snorted. ‘You’re a piece of work.’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

We did that a few times, the whole shebang with the hurried sex in my room (which I kept cleaner to avoid snide remarks from Mello, who is a bloody neat freak) and re-heating things in my oven and drinking glasses of water penned in by the smoke-stained walls of the living room. When he couldn’t stay over, we drove to the strip mall on his bike and stood around in the parking lot. When he couldn’t do that, he’d call me for about 15 minutes after dinner and get worked up about something mundane his mum had said until he had to hang up.

 

Around that time, I leant up against the steel door of a petrol station bathroom while Mello was refueling his bike and lit a blunt, and then some vulturey asshole cop with a nose like a rat came out of hiding to search my bag. It was sunny and stifling, so hot there were mirages on the road. I could see Mello across the parking lot as though he were on the other side of a vast lake, shimmering, watching.

 

‘Uh... it’s... medical.’ There was a little of weed and a couple LSD tabs a coworker had sold me and I’d been carrying for a few months in case of an LSD emergency or something, I guess, so, yeah, it wasn’t medicinal, obviously.

 

The cop had to tell me three times to stop smoking my shit before I stamped it under my heel with the excessive violence of someone who isn’t paying attention to their motor control... because I was scared as fuck. I actually cried a little. I think I’d rather stare down the gaping maw of one of Mello’s demons than talk to a cop outside a concrete bathroom in a parking lot.

 

And I got a possession charge. Had to go to court and everything, almost went to jail. My free lawyer did a good job bringing everyone’s attention to my relatively recent 18th birthday and dumb, confused expression. Described me as an ignorant party-kid who was getting a tough lesson about the law or something and I’d never do it again and now I knew something about some other thing, I don’t know, I wasn’t listening attentively enough to have soaked it in.

 

‘Great.’ Mello said after the trial, when I told him over the phone that I was giving up food in favour of paying back my fine and starting life as some sort of druggie felon. ‘My Mother’s invited you over. I told her we’re dating.’

 

‘Dating?’

 

‘I’ll pick you up after church.’ He said testily. ‘I assume you’re home.’

 

‘Yeah, cool, yup.’

 

I memorised the route to his house – around the bend behind Sonny’s, left at the stop sign, straight until the Community Pool, right, right, grocery store, straight ahead, slight left, 1077 Gallegos Crescent near the Middle School. When we got off the bike, I looked out across a football field and then around at his garden and stone footpath. I wanted to know how to get there so it would feel real when I was at home thinking about it.

 

‘We can go through the basement door and get you a soda.’ Mello said in a low voice. The hedges seperating the Keehl lawn from the neighbours were like plastic. I’m not completely stupid, so I knew it was only a pretty nice street and not a mansion in Beverly Hills, but I was still impressed by the contrast Mello made against the pastel popcorn walls of his childhood home. He was dressed for church, in clean-cut black jeans and a white dress shirt and his rosary beads hanging, but his face was so hard and his eyes so flinty he was like a knifeblade on butter.

 

His mum was dressed up, too, and I was wearing a t-shirt that I’d thought was fine until Mello had seen me in the driveway and risen his eyebrows judgily before shoving his helmet into my solar plexus. She shook my hand softly. She looked like Mello, short and strong with tough hands. Kinder eyes than him, though.

 

‘Matt, I have heard a lot about you.’ She said, voice accented in a way I realised with a bit of a shock Mello’s sometimes was, too. ‘I am Marina.’

 

‘Hey.’

 

Mello’s house was full of crosses and was extremely beige. We sat at a thick wooden table in an old fashioned looking dining room, lit by a huge window and overlooked by a big virgin Mary scultpure sitting on a cabinet full of decorative plates. Marina took my hand with forceful affection, and Mello took the other similarly, so we could close our eyes and thank Jesus for being dead.

 

‘I was always wondering why Mihael never brought me girlfriend.’ Marina said, after I’d started putting orange slices in my mouth while Mello stared unflinchingly at the side of my head.

 

I looked up to witness her tight-humoured smile. ‘Sorry.’

 

Mello didn’t move. ‘Matt’s not gonna to give you grandchildren, Mama.’

 

Marina kept smiling. I was thinking, what is up with this bloody family? They have no human expresions. I was also putting grapes into my mouth, now, quickly.

 

‘Of course. I am happy to meet you, Matt. Mello tells me you are a hardworking young man.’

 

‘I work at Sonny’s.’ I shrugged. Mello had only ever called me a lay-about to my face. It was odd to think about him thinking about me – I mean, him talking about me, perceiving and then sharing the perception so that other people perceived me when I wasn’t there to disappoint them; Mello passing on kindnesses about me that I didn’t deserve. Odd.

 

‘That is why Mello is always asking to go to Sonny’s without me.’ She said warmly. ‘With my money. But not with me.’

 

I chuckled. I really like Mello’s mum, even with all the Catholic guilt and loving the sinner but not the sin. He does, too, he just shows his love differently than people who experience human empathy and talks to her in the same growl he uses on people who’ve pissed him right off – the same one he uses on me, coincidentally. Maybe she was different when I wasn’t around. Maybe she didn’t like me as much as she said she did, and was just being polite, and that was why Mello was so complimentary when they were alone together. Maybe he needed to defend his lay-about, smoke-reeking, atheist partner in homosexual crime, I don’t know. Other people’s homes are never the same when you’re not in them.

 

I said I wanted a tour after lunch when what I really wanted was to see how Mello lived – not how he lived with his mum in the kitchen and the hallways, not the mantel with photographs of a handsome dead father, but how he was in his private spaces, like if he had his own bathroom what soap did he use? Was there hair in the sink? Would the everyday shit he touched and the view out of his window surprise me or feel familiar? Like, did he make himself different when we were together and then slip into some new skin when he was alone? That sort of shit bothered me a lot. I hoped he was perfect for me because I loved him but God didn’t make Mello so that Matt could have a happy ending so I wanted to see something real, something I hadn’t daydreamt.

 

I trudged up the stairs after him while his mum lingered downstairs. I felt her down there, kept wondering if she could hear the undertones of my voice when I stepped on Mello’s heel and he whipped around to glare at me, knocking me into the banister with his elbow and I said ‘fuck, sorry’.

 

Mello closed his bedroom door behind us. His room was clean, dark. He had black curtains and black sheets, a wooden cross over the window, a heavy desk, a bookshelf full of Russian and German shit.

 

‘You read.’ I said, dumb in the starchy air. My family’s Russian I guess, but I never learnt the language or thought about the country much.

 

‘Can you not read, Matt?’

 

‘This your diary?’ I asked, moving towards the desk where he had stacked dated journals next to what looked like a short vase full of nice pens. I’d never written more than two sentences without a computer.

 

‘Open it and find out.’ He answered from the bed, where he’d sat crossed legged.

 

It was sort of a diary. It was the sort of diary a paranoid schizophrenic might keep. I think he’d taken notes on every bit of local news to do with violent crime and prison deaths there was, and then, when that wasn’t enough gore, all of the international shite, too. Half of it was in Japanese, which I couldn’t read (he would teach it to me, and then I would read his diary again and be taken aback all over again at the depth and detail to his madness). None of it had anything to do with him personally, but I still felt like I’d just been handed the key to decrypting his weird personality.

 

‘What is it?’ I asked, flipping the book around so he knew I was talking about some graphic images I doubt the police intended to release to a kid who was going to print them off and paste them in a serial killer book.

 

‘Investigative journalism.’ Mello said, smoothly. ‘Have you ever paid any attention to something other than the back of your hand?’

 

‘Not really, I guess.’

 

‘I started documenting the BB murder case a couple years ago. But this is bigger. It’s _important.’_ Mello stood swifty and snatched the book I was looking at out of my hands, replacing it with another. ‘Kira.’

 

‘Right. I heard about that.’

 

‘The government won’t release any good information.’ Mello said poisonously, pointing at a chunk of Japanese text and then trailing his finger down to a snapshot of what appeared to be footage off a security camera. ‘I’ve been wading through the bullshit and the propaganda, trying to find _truth.’_

 

I always liked his passion. I nodded. ‘Seems like you got a lot.’

 

‘More than any idiot beat cop.’ He said smugly, turning a few pages until the words were in English again. Theories, connections. It looked like he’d been writing essays for fun. ‘They’ve been fumbling this case. No one’s willing to do what needs to be done. People are cowing to the yellow media.’

 

‘Yeah.’ I didn’t talk to people much in any sort of deep or meaningful way so I didn’t know the social climate, but I did watch cable television, so I believed him. I didn’t think about Kira at all and it never kept me up at night, but I didn’t say that, I said: ‘This is like, serious detective shit.’

 

His face lit up like a jack-o-latern – very scary, with the bug-eyes and his little teeth. ‘I’m going to put a bullet in Kira’s head.’ He said succintly. I wondered if his mum had seen his journals and how she felt about the intensity of his obsession, about the blood and guts and the spark it all put in his crazy eyes. ‘Before the idiots in the task force do.’

 

‘You don’t have a gun.’ I muttered, looking back down at the journal.

 

‘You’re mine, aren’t you, Matt?’ Mello asked in a voice like tempered steel.

 

‘Uhhh...’

 

‘Are you?’

 

‘Ok.’ It occured to me for the first time in that room that he had issues – an inferiority complex, a control thing, something psychosomatic. I hoped, and would continue to hope for a few wild months in 2008, that Mello and I were going to do despicable things together and then go out in a blaze of glory. I don’t know why I wanted that. It was crazy to want it; I don’t want it anymore. ‘Yeah, sure.’

 

His stare was close to my face, nose to forehead. I was looking down at his notes, fingers on the faces of grainy people. He stepped around me suddenly, brushing my sleeve, moving like a cat in a tube, really quick and sure and quiet, and opened one of the drawers in his fancy writing desk and lifted a handgun out like it was just a wad of socks or something equally mundane.

 

‘Ok.’ I repeated, vague. ‘You’re serious.’

 

‘Obviously.’

 

Obviously. Right. _Obviously._ Mello doesn’t fuck around, I’ve learnt. He was never fucking about with his journals, and he wasn’t writing essays for fun. Everyhing meant something to him, everything mattered, everything was intense and it to him, it was real.

 

‘So you’re gonna just roll up next to his car – _pew pew_ – just like that?’ I asked.

 

He held the gun like he knew how. His mum must not search his things. Maybe she never went in his room at all. He was scary under the dim lamplight, cornered by the blackout curtains. Did she know he was scary in this way? Was she scared sometimes when she looked in his eyes? I was still thinking about her a lot because I knew she was on the other side of the floorboards doing the dishes with 100.3 The Prayer playing on the radio, making a raquet about God’s unfailing, no-holds barred love.

 

‘I have a lot of work to do.’ He said, ignoring me. He ignored my dumber comments a lot because if he acknowledged them we’d end up talking in circles and arguing. It was a blessing he ignored my dumber comments, he told me that once. If he answered every question I’d ever asked we’d still be in Sonny’s with the counter between us and I’d be listening to him explain what the heck’s the point of a Holy Ghost and how’s it different from demonic possession, really? Did anyone ever accept the Holy Spirit and get, like, Jezebel instead? ‘I need people, people with power. Connexions, Matt.’

 

‘Makes sense.’

 

‘The Russians made this untracable.’ Mello said.

 

‘The Russians.’

 

‘You heard me.’ He met my eyes again. We had both been looking at the gun, him with some sort of loving severity and me feeling too flooded by weirdness to feel anything at all, anymore, except numb acceptance. I assumed what he was telling me was that he was hanging out with the mob.

 

‘When do you find the time for this?’

 

‘Do you know what I like about you, Matt?’

 

I frowned. ‘No.’

 

‘You don’t get jumpy.’ He was still so close that his breath was on my face. ‘I need you to promise me that you’re not gonna be a bitch about this. Is that understood?’

 

‘Uhuh. I’ve always wanted to be one of those Mafia wives.’ I hadn’t really, but now I thought it was a bit cool that Mello was turning out to be a gangster. It made more sense to me now, I guess, that I was with a criminally minded wack-job than it had when I thought I was with a catholic whiz-kid, because what sort of good upstanding citizen would pick me out of a crowd to ‘date’ or whatever? Stereotypes and low self-worth and such.

 

‘Lucky you.’ He put the gun in his pocket, where it stuck out awkwardly.

 

He liked carrying it. He would carry it more and more often over the summer, in an inside pocket of his leather jacket and then, eventually, in his pants like a pervert. I never really knew Sunday school-going, straight-As-achieving Mello, but I could picture him the way he’d looked that first time I saw him, in the booth at Sonny’s in the sunlight, angelic, and I knew that promising young man must have been hanging around the neighbourhood sometime the year befor with his mum and his Sunday best, using his allowance to buy Snickers from the Tesco on the corner, looking forward to an above-average, likely collegiate future. That year, Mello turned down offers from good schools to stay in town with the Russian mob and with me, the guy behind the counter at a fast food diner and no prospects. He kept coming into Sonny’s after church all through September, and Linda started referring to him as my boyfriend and then smiling at me like she’d been praying I’d develop a normal social life someday without a lot of hope, but seeing Mello put faith in God back into her heart.

 

We talked about Hell behind the restaurant, same as always, except now Mello had the gun and he spoke with urgency. I shuffled while I smoked, one hand tucked into my coat and Mello told me that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.

 

‘I can get behind that.’ I said, tapping ash onto the toe of my converse. ‘Sounds like Rage Against the Machine.’

 

‘I thought you’d like that one.’ He said. ‘How about “ _They sacrificed to demons who were not God, to gods whom they have not known, new gods who came lately.”_ What do you think that means?’

 

‘God wants to hoard all the worship for himself because he was here first. First come first serve.’

 

Mello shrugged. ‘It means there are demons, and dark gods with Evil power, lesser than that of the Lord. And there are people who worship those gods.’

 

‘Satanists. Still sounds like Rage Against the Machine.’

 

Mello snorted. ‘People are calling Kira the god of Death.’

 

‘Seems a bit melodramatic.’

 

‘He’s deciding the fates of men.’ Mello said.

 

‘I decide the fates of like six flies a day.’

 

‘If you did the dishes more than once a year you wouldn’t have to.’

 

I got through three cigarettes. I was getting faster at inhaling them down. Bible talk was starting to make me antsy.

 

‘Matt.’ Mello said, when he saw me turn to slip back inside. ‘Come over tonight. We have somethin’ to talk about.’

 

‘I’ll be out of here by 8.’

 

‘We’ll eat together.’

 

‘Cool.’

 

He put his hand in my hair and I grabbed a piece of his jacket and he kissed me. I felt inescapably attached to our routine and to him, like a thread had been cinched tight around my throat and now I needed him to breathe.

 

‘Late again.’ Linda said with an eyebrow wiggle that was quickly becoming exasperated when it used to be teasing. ‘Your boyfriend’s a bad influence.’

 

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been early.’

 

‘No, you were never that.’ Linda conceeded.

 

I watched the clock until it was 8 and I could leave, flicking a cloth at a clean table. I could see Mello outside, straddling his bike, arms crossed. He was wearing leather pants almost every day now, and aviators.

 

His mum got used to seeing me over the next year, used to eating alone and then reheating peas and potatoes for us when I got off work and then sitting across from us at the table after we’d prayed, used to watching the stray her son had dragged in shove a fork into his mouth like he was trying to set a world record, and then listening to my footsteps follow Mello up the stairs. I’d give her what I thought was a polite nod when I came sneaking back down to go smoke on the front stoop.

 

Mello was adding theories to his journals, bouncing them off me, talking about demons, always demons and Satan and symbols and a pentagram in a jail cell somewhere in Japan. I put my backpack down by his bed and sat on the black fabric, shifted up to the headboard and stared at the white ceiling, the dark light. It was nice to be out of my own house, and I started to think about Mello and I getting an apartment somewhere that wasn’t the empty trash heap my parents had left me in when they’d gone and died, where we could be alone and together.

 

Mello crawled up the mattress to lay sideways against me, let out a big breath that might have been the first he’d taken since he started ranting as soon as the door clicked shut behind us, and flopped his arm across my abdomen where the restraints go on roller coasters.

 

‘Did you pay your fine?’ He asked in a voice like slow thunder.

 

‘I’m doing installments.’

 

‘Stop. I have money.’

 

I nodded. He’d been starting to talk about his mob activities like they were a real job, and they evidently were, because after making out a bit he reached around and dug under the boxspring and came back with a wad of cash.

 

‘If you need something, tell me.’ He said, settling back down beside me. The money was just on the bed now, like we were whores in a music video getting rained on.

 

‘I kinda want a Wii.’

 

Mello rolled his eyes. ‘Can’t you think of something better than that, Matt?’

 

‘Dunno.’ He had taken his gun out of his jacket, tossed the jacket at the wall, and put the gun on the pillow where I could see it out of the corner of my eye. I’d been wanting to see how it felt to hold it for a while, so I grabbed it and held it up above our heads like the little lion baby in The Lion King.

 

‘Be careful,’ Mello said casually, ‘the safety’s off.’

 

I looked at him incredulously, changing my grip so I was holding it a little more like an unfortunate cleaning lady with a used condom. ‘Why?’

 

‘You don’t need to be handling it, anyway.’ He said, taking it from me and putting it back on the pillow instead of doing something reasonable like throwing it across the room where it was safe.

 

‘Guess not.’

 

We went back to making out. I could tell Mello felt powerful. Being in the mob, having that gun there where my hair brushed it when I shifted onto my back. He’s controlling as fuck – duh, right? but it took me almost until then to really get it. And he wasn’t scared of anything, not of getting shot, not of sin, not of the cross on his wall, not of anything at all. It’s dangerous not to feel afraid.

 

‘Come to church with me.’ Mello said, while I was putting my jeans on to go have another smoke.

 

‘I work Sundays.’

 

‘Don’t work next Sunday.’

 

‘It’s not that easy.’

 

‘Tell me it’s not easy after you’ve made an effort, Matt.’

 

‘Ok.’

 

I was startled by the sight of his naked white chest in the cocoon of his black sheets, with the crucifix red on his sternum, in the same way I was often startled by him. It was a feeling like veneration.

 

I asked him once if he thought mankind needed sprituality, even when we had science to explain the cosmos and the way babies are made and all that stuff, like did we need it emotionally? Was it psychologically vital for us, is it in our nature to worship and exhalt and seek meaning? He said, personally, he isn’t Catholic because of a hole in his heart.

 

Saturday night I sat alone on the stairs, trying to sound nasally on the phone with the manager at Sonny’s so I could go repent my sins instead of going to work. First sin I’d ask forgiveness for would have to be lying.

 

Next day I was up at 9.00 eating a handful of dry cereal with my legs hanging off the back of the living room couch, thinking I’d go wait for Mello’s mum on the curb in a moment, when a knock on the door startled me into slipping down the cushions and thwacking my head on the floor.

 

Marina smiled at me when I opened the door. I didn’t like seeing her there because it felt weird to put her on the step where my cousin used to piss when he was drunk in the summer. He’d been pissing on the concrete under her high-heels since the beginning of my memory up until a couple years ago. We’d never washed it, it just dried.

 

‘Good morning, Matt.’ She greeted me. ‘Are your parents home?’

 

‘No.’ I said, closing the door on the empty mildewy entryway.

 

‘I am so happy you are coming to worship with us.’ She continued.

 

I wanted to get off the stairs, but I didn’t want to brush past her. ‘Yeah.’

 

‘Have you eaten breakfast?’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

She nodded. Her mouth hadn’t moved at all. Mello could do that, too; make his face stick so he brought whatever emotion he’d chosen to wear into every new sentence with him. He was sitting in the front seat staring straight ahead into the clouds through his dark sunglasses, waiting, when we finally trudged across the muddy lawn and crawled into the car,. His leather jacket was new and it creaked when he reached out to turn the radio down.

 

The church was big and I think it was actually a cathedral. There were real human bones inside. I didn’t know the script for being in church so I felt like I couldn’t say anything. There were times to stand, times to listen to music, times to listen to talking, times to know the words to prayers. I kept missing cues and getting distracted. Mello’s fingers brushed my outer thigh a lot, like he was checking that I was solid beside him.

 

I couldn’t hold in a snort when the guy at the front shouted, ‘Your wife will become a prostitute in the streets!’, with religious passion, and then Mello rapped his knuckles on my knee like a teacher disciplining a disruptive kid in class.

 

As a reward for our immense patience, there was a reception in a more modern outbuilding on the church property, with scones and coffee and vegetable platters and little crackers with cheese and all that sort of finger food. There was a piano in there, and Mello showed me how he could play Ave Maria while I sat next to him on the bench. He put my fingers on D, on A, on C, and I tried to remember the chords so I could say he’d taught me something with his hands on my hands like in a Julia Roberts movie.

 

‘The priest here does exorcisms.’ Mello told me over the chatter of people and the clattering of Ave Maria.

 

‘Does that happen a lot?’

 

Mello shook his head. ‘But anyone can perform the rites, so who knows.’

 

‘Could you?’

 

‘I know them.’

 

I nodded. ‘Could come in handy.’

 

‘BB claimed he was given direction to kill his victims from a god – a demon that told him their names and granted him the power to kill them using supernatural methods.’

 

‘Looked a lot like normal stabbings to me.’ Mello had those pictures in his journals. A lot of them, from a lot of angles. Pictures of the knives used. Pictures of the killer staring out of a mug shot with bright eyes. Pictures of blood splatter, everywhere. Gruesome comments, suspicion that he ingested the blood, photos of jars full of it in his mini-fridge. Really creepy.

 

‘Are you the expert on stabbings now?’ Mello asked flippantly. ‘Kira claims the same thing. The exact same thing.’

 

‘Copycat?’

 

I could see Mello getting frustrated, and knew there was something he was trying to tell me that was going over my head. ‘That’s what the incompetent child at the head of the investigation thinks.’ He sneered. ‘He’s too rigid to look at the case from a different perspective, to explore the avenues only I’m willing to explore, to face the harrowing truth.’

 

‘Sure. Cops are lame.’

 

Mello stopped playing. He’d been playing Ave Maria for a while. We stood up to grab food, and then sat in metal chairs around a plastic table where no one else was sitting.

 

‘Kira’s power isn’t earthly.’ Mello said, apparently not finished raving yet.

 

I nodded, feeling like I’d been totally dunked in the Catholic kool-aid, baptised; and tried putting a grape on a cracker. Not good.

 

After the church stuff, I was in the mood to do something contrary so I asked Mello if he’d grab a pint with me.

 

‘At noon?’ He said, raising his eyebrows. We were waiting for his mum on a bench on the cathedral lawn while she talked to a woman about banana bread.

 

I shrugged. I just felt like getting a beer with him. Maybe I wanted to sink back to my level and take him with me. I didn’t feel comfortable being myself around old people and people in preppy clothes, and Mello’s church was full of old people and people in preppy clothes.

 

‘We can walk.’ Mello decided. He wasn’t shy about letting his knee press against mine, not even a little bit accidental. I don’t think he’s ever felt uncomfortable being himself around anyone, no matter what they look like or what they might think he looks like. Right then he looked good. ‘I’ll tell my Mother we’re getting lunch out.’

 

‘Okay.’

 

We walked through puddles that had been left by a midmorning rain and into a mostly empty Irish Pub and sat in front of a mute TV with a stack of menus. Mello did get a beer. He drank it faster than I drank mine.

 

‘You should come to church with us more.’ Mello suggested, between pulls.

 

‘Free food was good.’ I shrugged. ‘I need to work, though.’

 

‘You don’t.’ Mello said. ‘I was going to suggest you quit.’

 

‘Easy for you to say. You’re not paying to keep the lights on in the Keehl mansion.’

 

He looked at me hard. ‘No. But I can pay to keep them on in the Jeevas hovel.’

 

I thought about the cash he’d rained on us. I thought about the Russian gun. ‘I don’t need you to do that.’

 

‘No shit you don’t. I’m offering, Matt. Take my fucking money. Pride doesn’t suit you.’

 

‘Sure.’ I linked my ankle around his under the table. Talking about money felt cold. It put us in a different place, in relation to each other, when he was rich. I know I kept going on earlier about how much richer he was than me because I’m working minimum wage and he lives with his nice mum with a mowed lawn and shit, but he had been like middle class and now he was trying to support my household on blood money. It was different. I wondered if he’d ever killed anyone and if so, was he hurting from the experience of first-hand violence? Was I imagining the fever on his skin or was he developing some sort of protective wax?

 

He was looking up at the televison screen, at the news. I looked up, too, and saw a giant calligraphic L behind white subtitles. ‘Hey, it’s Kira stuff.’

 

‘It’s Near.’ Mello growled.

 

L was talking about how people needed to stop talking like Kira, who killed people with criminal records exclusively, was some sort of vigilante when he was actually just a serial murderer. I don’t remember the specifics, I’m sure there’s record of that newscast somewhere if you care. It was setting Mello off a little, especially when L went into a spiel about how close they were to catching him.

 

‘He’s rubbing it in my face.’ Mello spat. ‘They won’t admit to the public that something more is going on.’

 

‘You know L?’ I asked.

 

‘No shit, Matt. It’s Near.’

 

‘Near. Uh, like... the guy who...’ I didn’t want to say “beat you for Valedictorian” or anything else that would make him worse, since he was already spitting about the dumb news report. ‘From highschool?’

 

‘Yes, Matt, from highschool.’

 

‘Seriously? How?’

 

Mello rolled his eyes. ‘Pay more attention to the things around you.’ He griped.

 

‘I thought L was old. He’s been a detective since I was a kid.’

 

‘The old L is gone. Near took his place. He was _selected.’ And I wasn’t_ was implicit.

 

‘How?’

 

‘You wouldn’t know anything about it.’ Mello spat. ‘You weren’t in the running. It was me or him.’

 

‘Like the FBI was watching you or something?’

 

‘Something.’ Mello waved me off, so I never learnt how he thought Near had become L. We ordered another round. I was starting to feel like the conversation was dangerous, but I didn’t know why, so I asked him what he did for the Russians and he said if he told me he’d have to dump me in a river somewhere in Liverpool.

 

I gave my two weeks notice at Sonny’s. Linda hugged me that day, even though she’d see me 12 more times. She asked me to visit whenever, but after I quit, I never did.

 

‘We’ll miss you.’ Linda said, at the end of my last shift. Mello was already outside. He was probably sick of being in the alley. It was probably time I grew up again. I felt heavier even though I think I’d lost a few pounds now that I was smoking a pack a day.

 

Oh yeah – Linda had asked me once if Mello was nice, and I’d said ‘I don’t think anyone would call him nice.’ That was probably why she had given me such a wonky smile when I left with him that last time, instead of the forceful-joyful one she’d slathered on when she thought I was awkward. What was I now that I obviously wasn’t just her awkward co-worker? What was I in March 2008? I was 19 and I was an idiot and I had no idea what I had attached myself to, romantically and now financially. But what did Linda think I was? Did she think I was a sucker, did she think I was a blossoming deadbeat? Probably both.

 

I don’t think I was, though. A sucker, I mean. I always knew not to rely on Mello completely – no one can even trust themselves to be loyal to others, no matter how dutiful you think you are, because everyone’s a selfish jerk at heart even me and if Mello ever fucked me over I wouldn’t be shell-shocked about it. Expecting someone else to put you first, every time, forever, is like expecting a bullet coming at you at 50mph not to put a hole in your heart just because you have faith. People aren’t reliable; you never know what’s up with them or what they’re thinking of doing or if they even give a shit about you. Maybe the heavy pesimism isn’t helping my case, but listen: I really wasn’t a total sucker. I was just in love, and willing to take some risks for it.

 

Anyway, Mello told me this saying, I think he picked it up from the Russians: _God keeps those safe who keep themselves safe._ He might have only said it twice, maybe three times, but it rattled in my hollow head every time I watched him get off his motorcycle, every time I saw the gun in his palm, and sometimes when I was standing in the shower with my head down. God keeps those safe who keep themselves safe. To me, it meant that there was only Mello and his choices and me and my choices, and we could do what we wanted and suffer if we wanted whether there was a God or not.

 

Then in that cold summer my cousin died, so my aunt came home to deal with it and threw some of my stuff out onto the lawn because I guess she hadn’t known I was still living in her house, filling up the fridge with Mello’s leftovers and paying to have the mail delivered and keeping the roof over my head during the rainy years of my late teens. I don’t know what she thought I was doing if I wasn’t living there. I don’t know why she thought I’d care if she tossed some hoodies out of my window into some puddles, I just picked them up again and held them in one arm, lit cigarette in the other. I could just wash them. It was the computer that mattered, not the hoodies. I hadn’t seen her in years and I just reckoned she was grieving in her own way, probably traumatised because she’d been to the morgue or wherever they keep the recently deceased and seen his puffed up dead face earlier that day. I hadn’t gone to see him. I guess he’d been hit by a truck at 3am a couple days ago and come home and just died on his futon. I’d found him because someone had called the landline asking why he hadn’t come into work. It hadn’t occured to me to check on him, ever. He was 23.

 

It was weird to look at the house from the sidewalk and see my aunt in the window, schreeching. It was weird that I had been alone for days and not known it. I couldn’t get my head around it. Shouldn’t you know when there’s death in your home? My dresser shattered on the grass when she managed to heave it over the window sill. It was raining very lightly. I pulled on one of the hoodies. I was taking drags. I felt calm like I’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen and I wondered where my sadness was, where my worry was, where my instincts were. _Are you going to go get your shit,_ Matt? I asked myself, _Are you going to defend yourself? Are you going to mourn any time soon?_ _Maybe you’re homeless now. Do you care?_

 

‘That’s your fucking cousin!’ My aunt screamed out the window. She hadn’t seen him either. She was guilty, I bet. She was going to kick and cry about how much she’d loved him and needed him but she hadn’t seen him in years. ‘Freeloading shit!’

 

I guess technically that was true. But what did she think was going on in that house? I still don’t get it. Did she think she was leaving an empty place to the rats for a while until she wanted it again? Did she forget? Maybe she was on something. She looked older, lined and thin. I don’t know. I really don’t.

 

A license plate I’d had under my office chair fell into the dirt. My monitor, old cheap thing, smashed. Now I should care. Any moment I would feel it. I crossed my arms and kept watching her frantically trying to find things she could lift. My sheets fluttered down. My pillow. She was being loud, someone might call the cops.

 

The window closed, the curtains were pulled. The front door was already locked. I finished my smoke and then gathered up the good stuff – a couple CDs, most of the clothes. She hadn’t gutted the bathroom so I had no toothbrush.

 

That was a bad day. Sometimes shit can go really wrong. I guess you have to move on.

 

It was a good thing I’d memorised the route to Mello’s house, because I walked it. I struggled to light another cigarette with a big bundle of shit in my arms. I actually felt like a stoic, like an unflappable badass, nestling the cigarette in my back teeth and reaching awkwardly up to flick the ashes. I was taking it all in stride. I was fine. I wasn’t feeling anything at all, except a little pain in my arches from walking in flat shoes past Sonny’s, past parks, lefts and rights, up to Mello’s front door.

 

‘Hello, Matt.’ Marina greeted me after I’d knocked.

 

I didn’t prepare anything to say to her. I barely knew what I was doing. ‘Hey.’ I said, looking at the floor under her heels.

 

‘Mello is not here now.’

 

‘Okay.’ I shifted my bundle. I’d tied the shirt sleeves together to make it more practical – it wasn’t going to fall apart like a junk bomb, it was just big and awkward. I was already thinking _park bench_ and _public toilettes in the square_ and _poorly enforced no loitering rules at Sonny’s_ when she smiled and invited me in, anyway, for tea.

 

‘Would you like to put those things in Mihael’s room?’ She asked.

 

‘Yeah.’ I wondered what she thought about the things. I show up announced with a change of clothes, like a lunatic. I dumped them on Mello’s bed. It wasn’t right to be in his room alone, so I did it quickly and closed the door behind me.

 

‘It is lemon.’ Marina told me, putting a cup of tea in my hands. ‘Why don’t we sit on the couch?’

 

I knew she was trying to make me comfortable. That was why I liked her. I got the impression she was trying with me, and since she didn’t have a lot to work with, I had to give her credit. ‘Yeah.’

 

She had been watching a pretty nice movie, and she turned it back on. Mostly it was about love, but there was some arguing and stuff, too. The living room had felt huge to me when I’d first seen it, but it had compressed over time until I felt like a grapefruit in a pea pod between the impressionist painting on one wall and the collection of Mello’s school photos on the other. There was a ticking clock that filled any silence with a heartbeat so you knew how long you’d been pausing uncomfortably for.

 

‘Hey,’ I started, and then cleared my throat over the clock and the TV, ‘thanks.’

 

‘You are welcome, Matt.’ Marina said.

 

‘I don’t want to like... bother you.’ I felt bad for distracting her from the romance and sword fighting but I wanted to psych myself up to ask her if I could sleep in her son’s bed until I knew whether my aunt was holding fortress in the house forever or if I could afford to get an apartment on Mello’s blood money or what, so I needed to say something as a warm-up.

 

‘Romans 12:13 tells us to share hospitality.’ Marina told me, gently. ‘Mihael won’t be long. You do not mind sitting with an old woman?’

 

‘Uh, no.’

 

‘No, you don’t mind that I am old?’

 

‘No... sorry.’

 

Marina laughed a little bit. ‘You like my son?’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

‘He likes you very much.’

 

‘Okay.’

 

‘I hope is good for him.’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

The clock. The actress crying, being rained on. Rain outside, hammering now, vicious. Surreal, my hands on the warm china teacup, my stomach empty, my chest cold.

 

Mello broke the atmosphere up when he came in through the door. He had loud footsteps, and he called out in a jumble of words followed by _Mama._ I never asked what language they spoke at home. Something slavic, I think.

 

Marina stood, took my empty cup from me, and left the room. I followed.

 

Mello had his head bowed, unlacing cherrybomb boots that kissed the back of his knees. He had another new jacket, with buckles on the outside and fur on the inside that pushed his hair onto his cheeks and kept it dry.

 

‘Matt is visiting.’ Marina said.

 

Mello snapped up to put his eyes on me. ‘I went by your house.’ He said. ‘I saw you’d moved out.’

 

‘Oh.’

 

‘ _Mama, Matt -’_ and then lots of stuff I didn’t understand. He’d never tried to talk over me like that before, but he’d do it again. His mum never did. She always spoke English so there could be no secrets in my face.

 

‘Of course he is staying.’ She said in reply, turning and reaching back to clamp her hand on my arm. ‘Romans, Matt. I never forget Romans.’

 

‘Thanks.’ I said. She was one of those good Christians who puts the nice stuff in the Gospel over the ugly. I know she had all these beliefs – gays will go to Hell type of beliefs – down underneath, but I thought she was a good Christian because she kept on loving the sinners and let me sleep in Mello’s room with the door closed and never let me see if it bothered her or not, which I know it did only because Mello told me. At least she didn’t throw Mello’s fancy desk out the window about it.

 

Staying there had a pretty uniform routine. Marina ate half a grapefruit in the morning with a spoonful of sugar, Mello drank a cup of black coffee, and I sat drowsily at the table with my cheek in my hand because I’d never woken up so early in my life and it was miserable. They prayed over the half grapefruit, the coffee, and then prayed for me to open to my eyes when the prayer was done and not be asleep in my chair. We prayed with hands clasped under the watchful eyes of the giant virgin Mary.

 

It was weird to stay home with Marina (she only worked short hours 4 days a week since Mello started supporting the home), so after breakfast I’d hitch a ride with Mello into town where he met the Russians. He’d leave me on a busy street with a fistful of cash for lunch, advise me to buy new shoes or a proper raincoat or to replace my gameboy, and then I’d wander around despondantely trying to make my own fun. That was how I found the Internet Cafe on Havana Rd. It also sold milkshakes, fuck if I know why.

 

It was cheap to stay all day, and after the first few times I did, the chick behind the counter started giving me a free milkshake so I could spend my lunch money on more Internet instead of on lunch. Lame that I had lunch money like a kindergartener, I know. I know.

 

But I didn’t have to miss my old shit, thanks to Mello’s lunch money. I never even went back to the house, even for more of my clothes. Mello did whatever it was he was doing, turned it into cash, and replaced the things that had been chucked out and the things that had been left inside both. I’m not sentimental, so I was like, fine, whatever. I was still waiting to mourn my cousin. I thought I should mourn my cousin before I started mourning my socks, my bong, my lamp, my independence.

 

I played a lot of video games, a lot of war games – you know, programming stuff, hacker games. I tried every flavour of milkshake since they only had five, liked vanilla best because apparently my tastes run a little on the boring side. It wasn’t a bad way to live.

 

Mello would idle outside the Internet cafe at around 6pm and look dead ahead, and then I would slouch over to his bike, light a smoke, and bear his complaints (of the ‘you couldn’t have done that before I got here?’ variety), climb on the back, and we’d go home for dinner. Marina always had it ready by the time we’d kicked our boots off in the hall. She kissed Mello every evening on both cheeks, and within a day she started kissing me, too, like I was family.

 

And there was church on Sunday, of course. Mello didn’t go to the Russians, or drive his bike on Sunday. We rode in his mum’s car, I learnt to say Hail Mary, Marina put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled my forehead onto her collarbone and cried with her arm in the air. I’d never left Manchester, but I thought I knew what culture shock felt like when I was staring at the floor, hair in my eyes, hands in my jeans pockets, bent at the waist, part of her ritualistic communion with God but seperate because I didn’t understand it. I don’t know what she was asking God for, or what it had to do with me, exactly, but I don’t think it’s hard to guess. Mello had ducked out of reach when she’d grabbed at him.

 

‘Since Kira’s in the States,’ Mello said at the reception, ‘that’s where we should be lookin’ at apartments.’

 

I wiped my fingers on my jeans. I’d been trying to eat a carrot cake without a fork because there’d been an old woman hovering around the utensils and I hadn’t wanted to prod her out of my way. ‘I don’t have a passport.’

 

‘Get one, then, Matt, obviously.’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

‘Near thinks he’s closing in.’ Mello went on. ‘I need to be there, or none of this will ever end.’

 

‘So... he’s not closing in?’ I asked. ‘Do the Russians mind if you move to America?’

 

‘He doesn’t have the tools to bring Kira down, so it doesn’t matter how close he is to finding out who he is.’ Mello snapped. ‘Don’t call them _The Russians._ They have people in the US, I can be one of those people. It’s not relevant to you.’

 

‘Sure.’ I put my elbows on the table. ‘America. Isn’t America horrible?’

 

‘I don’t know, Matt. I’ve never been there, have I?’

 

‘Guess not.’

 

I liked the idea, though. Not of America, I was indifferent about that really, but of having our own place. Basically Mello had asked me to move in with him. Technically I’d done that, but moving into his childhood bedroom and making him shove over in his bed while his mum slept on the other side of the wall and then waking up to have half a grapefruit and a cup of coffee with the Mother of God and the ticking clock was not what I’d call a ‘moving-in-together’ experience. It was desperation.

 

‘Hey,’ I asked, fingers still plucking at the carrot cake. I don’t like carrot cake that much, it’s mediocre at best. Who\y put carrots in cake, anyway? ‘couldn’t I get in with the Russians? I should have... income.’

 

‘Income?’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

Mello always sat with his legs crossed at reception, toe of his boot flicking against my calf, casually in contact with me all the time. It made me feel secure, I’ll be honest. ‘I don’t want you sellin’ crack on a street corner.’

 

‘I already have a drug charge.’ I said.

 

‘I don’t want you to.’ He repeated. ‘How will we ever get to L.A. if you’re in jail?’

 

‘Uh.... by not getting caught. You’re not in jail. Thanks for the confidence.’

 

‘I’m not selling crack.’ Mello said, a little petulant.

 

‘Then I won’t either. I’ll do what you’re doing.’

 

‘No one else does what I do.’ He patted the gun, which was on his hip. It was ludicrous that he had the gun in church. He loved that fucking gun. ‘Especially not _you_ , Matty.’

 

Patronised, I backed down, crossed my arms. ‘I’m not useless.’

 

‘No more useless than anyone else in the fucking world, Matt.’

 

‘Except you. You’re special.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

I snorted. His boot was still on my calf, pressing. It was like his mouth was always rude, always talking down, always snapping, and his body was always reaching for me like a sunflower to the horizon. I always thought about it like... he was supressing himself. Maybe his mum had told him boys don’t cry when he was little, maybe she’d told him... I don’t know. But she was affectionate with him, so probably not. Maybe his dad had. Maybe he’d decided it for himself, to be emotionally distant. Or maybe I was making that up and he was actually just a huge prick.

 

We looked at airfare back in his bedroom, with his laptop on the pillow and my head on his shoulder. I could hang my wrist out of his bedroom window from there and tap my ashes out; he let me because he was sick of me jumping up to put my coat on and then watching me smoke out on the sidewalk in the rain, sick of doing that sometimes every hour and getting cut off when he was talking because I wanted to do that. We looked at buildings, at kitchens and living rooms and south facing windows. The weather report for the City of Angels was absolute Hell. 30 fucking degrees, like every day. But it was good, sort of, planning for the future. It would be worth it. And it didn’t matter where we were.

 

This is where it gets a bit fucked up.

 

It was Monday, we did the half grapefruit, coffee, praying, holding each other so God knew we were in this thing together, and then Mello and I shot off on the bike, roaring in our ears, silence at stop lights. He kissed me when he left me in front of the Internet cafe, right there in the street, like he always did, unashamedly.

 

I went inside, the bells over the door rang. I remember it like it was a half-drunk haze, but I know I’m right about the details. I remember it like that because by about noon I was a bit emotional. Right, so... the bells, I paid for the computer, I had a crazy thought: I could help Mello whether he liked it or not. I could help him by being less ignorant about this Kira shit, since it mattered so much to him that he was willing to move around the world to L.A. to exorcise him or whatever. I could help him not just by knowing the names of demons and circles of Hell, but by knowing something real, like who was this Near guy, anyway? And what was all that shit about _selection_? Who passed Mello up for the position of L, when was that competition run, and why was it run among British teenagers?

 

Like I said, Mello and I went to different schools, he was suspended for bullying, and someone there had had higher grades than him: Near, who was the great detective, L. The same L who had made his debut in 1994, when Near would have been like 3 years old. That was all I knew.

 

I started by looking at the highschool. Mello was Mihael Keehl. Near must have been Nate Rivers, fast-tracked genius kid, apparently, because he’d skipped a few grades and scored above Mello by 0.6%. No mention of extra-curricular awards. No special programmes. So, it was secret. But I couldn’t find it. It was easy to get into the part of the school’s website intended only for staff, just a simple URL injection. Nothing. I had only barely expected to find anything, anyway, so no big deal. Nate Rivers – who was that? A short, casually dressed, odd looking kid in the grad class photo, which had been taken on the steps of a government building in black tie. Mello looked murderous next to him. I saved it to a flash drive, because it was pretty funny.

 

But then I found Nate Rivers again. And again. And again. He wasn’t hiding. He was going to Oxford. He was actually on facebook, though his profile was sparse and I didn’t bother looking into it, I was pretty sure it was him. I found a copy of a paper he’d written for class that had been published in a journal. According to Mello, he was operating in secrecy in New York, heading a Task Force, focused solely on Kira, mocking Mello on the television. According to Nate’s mother, who I called when I found her number in a list of reliable real estate agents in Manchester, he was living in a dorm on campus and busy preparing for exams, and he visited her very often, and she would be sure to tell him I’d called. She told me this because I told her I was Mihael Keehl looking to catch up and apologise, and hopefully to speak to him. She’d given me a phone number, and when I texted saying the same thing, Nate Rivers responded almost instantly by telling me it was about time but he didn’t trust my sincerity and not to contact him again. I got into his student account at Oxford and he had excellent grades and perfect attendance. Now it was noon.

 

A vanilla milkshake was placed next to me on the desk. ‘Thanks.’ I muttered to the girl. I didn’t want it that day, but it was free, so whatever. It melted next to me while I got myself into a minor spat with some asshole on a message board, leaning back, thinking, playing Snake, thinking.

 

I’d already crushed my cigarette under my shoe when Mello pulled up. He didn’t look so Holy to me anymore. Not just because I’d been fact checking him and shit, but in general. He was stunning but he wasn’t God.

 

‘You do confession, right?’ I asked.

 

‘Sometimes. Why?’

 

‘What sort of shit do you confess?’ I went on. ‘Like... just, what sort of shit?’

 

‘Penitence is protected by the sacremental seal, Matt.’

 

‘Sure. But you’re not a priest. You can tell me your own sins.’

 

Mello smiled with one side of his mouth. ‘Can I?’

 

‘Sure. I’m just asking.’

 

‘Are you planning to make me repent?’

 

‘Reckon that’s the priest’s job. Just want to know your sins.’

 

Mello turned the engine off. It didn’t get quieter, we were on a busy street. He leant back, took his gloves off, and folded them. He looked up at the heavy grey sky. ‘Forgive me Matt, for I have sinned.’

 

‘Uhuh.’

 

‘How long do you want to stand out here?’

 

‘What?’

 

‘D’ya want me to just tell you the new ones, so we’re home by dinner?’

 

I shrugged.

 

‘Well, this morning, I watched you change. That’s homosexual tendencies; impure thoughts.’

 

‘Hard not to watch, your room’s not big.’

 

‘Which isn’t at all the point, Matt. I’ve been harbouring hate for an old classmate and I want to wring his neck for disrespecting me as well as everyone who helped him along his way. I’ve been rightfully proud of my superior intelligence and rationality. I’ve driven recklessly to freak you out. I’m unapologetically rude to my own Mother, and I make her stand by while I have homosexual relations under her roof. And I presume the Lord will forgive my Sins, because I deserve Heaven and I believe I was chosen by Him to do His dirty work on Earth. And I don’t repent. I’m always going to do what I have to do.’

 

‘Do you talk to your priest like that?’

 

Mello sniggered. ‘No. Now get on, I’m fucking starving.’

 

I straddled the bike, put my arms around his middle. ‘What about lying?’ I asked, before the engine rumbled on. ‘Did you ever lie about Nate Rivers?’

 

I was sure he’d heard me. We obeyed traffic laws on the way back to his mum’s house, so I kept my grip loose and felt like the tension was a barrier between us, like I wasn’t even touching him I just thought I was, because something had gotten in the way.

 

He tromped up the stoop, into the house, with me behind him. It rained on us. Up the stairs to his bedroom.

 

Then: ‘What the fuck is that, Matt?’

 

‘What?’

 

‘Did I ever lie about Nate Rivers? What do you fucking mean by that, is what.’

 

‘I just saw his name today, that’s all.’ He’d drifted to the desk, to the dark window. It sucked him in, like attracts like sort of thing. He disappeared a little bit into the storm. I sat on the bed. ‘He’s going to Oxford.’

 

‘Of course he isn’t, Matt, you bleeding idiot.’ Mello sighed. ‘You’re calling me a liar.’

 

‘No.’

 

‘ _Yes._ ’

 

‘I just want to understand better. Like, what is all this shit? The notebooks, L.A., Kira. I just heard he was living in dorms at Oxford, doing Law or something.’

 

‘That is what the official press would say.’ Mello spat. ‘Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?’

 

‘There are pictures of him. His mum sees him on holidays.’

 

I hadn’t noticed that Mello was livid until he stepped closer, so the shadows slid off his cheeks and his angry mouth and bared teeth. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’re trying to say, here, Matt?’ He loomed.

 

‘I wanted to understand, is all. I wanted to understand what it is we’re doing. I wouldn’t have to Google it if you’d fucking tell me.’

 

Did I mention that we’d bought the plane tickets and Mello had found a vacancy for the beginning of November in an apartment building in a shitty part of Los Angeles with a No Smoking rule, and No Pets? We’d done that already, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t going, even if we were chasing smoke. I was still staying with him.

 

‘You’ve _read!_..’ Mello paused, finger pointed at my nose. He turned, opened the top drawer, shuffled around, and pulled out one of the journals. ‘You’ve read all the English.’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

Standing there, holding the book, bright eyes like a fever dream, he was terrible but not so terrible it scared me. He was realising his oversight. I was realising, too, that he hadn’t known I’d been following him blind, dazed and confuseed, listening to his sermon like I’d just wandered into class mid-way through, everything out of context.

 

‘You’ll need to learn a second language. Monolingualism makes you useless to society.’

 

‘You mean useless to you.’

 

Mello rolled his eyes. ‘Nate Rivers – Near. He was chosen to become L after Kira murdered L.’

 

‘I got that, I guess.’

 

‘Did you _get_ why this has all been done in extreme secrecy, confidential to all but the highest ranking government officials and the Task Forces assigned specifically to the case?’

 

‘Not really.’

 

It was good to have him on my side again. Christ, I had been about to backtrack and give in – I was this close to just saying ‘nevermind, don’t tell me, why don’t you just put me in your carry on where you can’t hear me questioning your judgement, research abilities, and relative sanity, and I’ll live in fucking Alaska if that’s where you’ve imagined Near today? Or Albequrque? I heard Albequerque’s hideous this time of year, why don’t we go live there and shove tumbleweeds up our asses for the rest of eternity? It sounds delightful, I’m happy to do it’, but then he was on my side again, thank God. He sat next to me. We liked to sit up against his headboard, our legs illuminated by the thick strip of light between the curtains. I needed a smoke. It was weird, but he was more likely to leave me alone to my habits on days when he’d snapped at me, so I felt confident he wouldn’t start spitting if I lit up in his bed.

 

‘Kira... he’s using the power of a demon.’ Mello said.

 

I kept on smoking.

 

‘Well?’

 

‘Well, I don’t know shit about that.’ I said, wondering if he was serious or if he’d finally told his first real joke.

 

‘There has been some information leaked which alludes to the nature and power of the demon. It seems Kira is using that power to murder criminals with impossible precision and skill. That’s why the police can’t handle it. _That’s_ why I need to be there.’

 

I’d pegged Mello for an Atheist-leaning, tradition-following, sinner of a Catholic who probably kept faith for the aesthetic and the ritual and the theatrics more than the fear of Hell, so I didn’t know what to say about that. I just smoked.

 

‘The media doesn’t want the public to panic about L’s death, so it doesn’t surprise me that Near is falsifying an existence at Oxford. I expected him to erase his old identity entirely, but it seems that isn’t the case.’

 

‘Seems that way.’

 

‘How did you find him?’ Mello asked.

 

‘Uh... I called around. Looked at some records. Some accounts. Facebook.’

 

‘Are you good at it?’

 

‘Good at looking at Facebook?’

 

‘No, Matt, _are you good at finding out about people?_ ’

 

‘Apparently.’

 

Mello seemed content with that. He looked out over his bedroom and lapsed into thought. I kept thinking about the pentacle in the jail cell, the symbols he’d drawn in red ink around the words I hadn’t understood. I strained my neck to look at the cross over his bed.

 

‘Should I learn Japanese, or should I learn whatever it is you and your mum speak?’

 

‘Kira is Japanese. Learn that.’ Mello said quickly.

 

‘What language is it, anyway?’

 

‘It doesn’t matter. I haven’t gotten any less hungry throughout this conversation. Let’s get downstairs, my Mother’s probably waiting. We’ve been up here too long.’

 

‘Right.’

 

‘You believe me, don’t you, Matt?’ He asked, with his hand on the doorknob.

 

‘I’m with you.’ I said, instead of lying.

 

‘Good.’

 

About a week later, Mello said goodbye to his mum at the airport with their usual two kisses. She was crying silently. It was dignified. He held her cheeks in his palms. He must have been such a good kid. I don’t know why I thought that, it was weird to think that, but I did. She had all those school pictures, she put up with so much. Unconditional love had been the carrot and the stick that controlled her behaviour towards the two of us ever since Mello had introduced me. He had to have been sweet at some point.

 

I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed when she didn’t kiss me. It made me feel... disconnected.All I had was a backpack over my shoulder and I was like an astronaut on a tether out in a void. I didn’t like the nagging thought that she felt like I was stealing her son away from her and away from God and that I was dragging him into a Hell she feared and believed in.

 

I’d never been in an airport, so I wasn’t prepared for how awful it would be. The stakes were high if you couldn’t find your terminal. It was like a bus bay but worse. So many people packed in tight, rushing. I felt like I’d left England as soon as we passed security, and I didn’t know where I was or if I was anywhere real. I went to the bathroom a lot just for something to do, and dried my hands with those air machines that make your skin ripple.

 

Mello let me put my legs in his lap while we flew over the city lights at night. I didn’t sleep at all. He read a book and played with the loose folds of my pajama pants, twisting the hem and tickling my knee so sometimes I kicked him and he glared at me. Suddenly he was my whole Universe. I hadn’t had friends in Manchester, but I’d had familiar streets. Now I felt a tug towards him stronger than gravity.

 

We landed in America 20 minutes late, and Mello got his bag from the carousel. He told me he’d been to Europe many times on a short little plane trip that hadn’t prepared him for the horrible boredom of flying to L.A., and I told him I’d taken the bus a bit but usually just walked.

 

I didn’t like L.A. right off the bat. It was too hot for the sweatshirt I’d been wearing on the plane, and it had a vibe. Tons of famous people were waiting in its crevices, but I don’t give a shit about famous people. Probably couldn’t even name one. Paris Hilton, I guess. Oprah.

 

We took a cab through cathedrals of palm trees, listening to American radio. What an opressive feeling, I can’t even describe it. It was like getting lost in a mall, or like going to someone’s house when you hardly know them, or being alone at home on a Holiday and watching fireworks on the TV. I thought about my cousin, dead in the basement. I thought about my dad and his lung cancer, my mum’s suicide, my aunt throwing all my shit out of the window, about spending my last year in highschool despondant and friendless. Being new to L.A. was just making me nostalgic for the familiar pain of home. Did Mello’s mum drive home crying, or did she wipe her tears, put on the Christian station – 100.3 The Prayer, was it? - and eat dinner alone in front of the television, numb? I remember the first night I spent alone in the house because everyone had moved out. It wasn’t the same as being alone but knowing someone would return. Unoccupied beds, unshared couches, meals for one... I had wanted to say goodbye to her, but I hadn’t. What would she do with Mello’s room? Would she leave it, dark and smoky? She would open the door and smell me there like a rot, her perfect son’s addict boyfriend getting his grimy figners all over the sacred space where she had raised him. Was she hating me? Was there anyone who gave a fuck about me, or would I disappear here in this dumb country? Would anyone notice if I just fell asleep with my head on the taxi window and never woke up? I took Mello’s hand.

 

The apartment had doors facing outside - no elevators, no corridors, just doors on top of each other. It was some sort of yellow colour, and the parking spaces were covered with a lip of building like a kid who didn’t really know what normal buildings looked like had designed it and been told to make sure there was shade for the cars. It was reasonably close to ammenities if you liked gas stations, places for lease, auto repair, and industrial shit like that. There was a free couch out in front, a big billboard advising us not to pay our speeding tickets, and a parking lot across the street. The skyline was skyscrapers. Our neighbours on one side had a beautiful rose garden. On the other side, an empty lot with a busted fence. I actually liked the apartment. I felt better when we stood in front of it, in all it’s big city desolate glory. Yeah, the apartment actually suited me fine.

 

I helped Mello roll his suitcases up the stairs to our door on the second floor, and stood with them while he went to the office to got the keys. He came back alone. I had been expecting someone like a superintendant to come show us the ropes – here’s how the shower knobs turn, here’s the table we strategically left over a bigass stain, here’s the broken thermostat I won’t pay for it, here’s the fridge it smells like rat shit. But we gave ourselves the tour.

 

The living room and kitchen were two rooms only because of a line where carpet became springy tile. The previous tenants hadn’t cleaned very well, Mello complained, but I didn’t agree. It looked alright. There were some pencil marks on the inside of the bathroom door where a kid had grown from waist height to shoulder height.

 

Our biggest challenge that first day was having nothing. We went down to the gas station and bought milk, some sandwhiches, chocolate bars, and a large coffee that Mello put in the fridge to save for morning, and ate dinner in the full sun of the living room.

 

‘Tenants are supposed to leave the curtains.’ Mello told me, while I shielded my eyes and picked apart a ham and cheese.

 

‘I’ve never gotten a sunburn in a house, before.’ I said. I’ve got paper skin, so it was a real possibility.

 

He stood, went to his bag, and pulled out some heavy coats in plastic bags. He’d needed so many suitcases to bring his ridiculous clothes to America. ‘There.’ He declared, draping them over the curtain rods. ‘I’ll rent a car tomorrow and we’ll go shopping.’

 

‘Ok. Thanks.’

 

We slept in the bedroom after I’d scattered what little I owned as far and wide as I could. It was sticky. Mello peeled his clothes off and stretched out on the carpet and I liked the mood of it all. Sunset on his skin, him on the floor, us with nothing but each other. It appealed.

 

‘Our own flat.’ I said, throwing my shirt into a corner.

 

‘I should have known moving in with you would mean sacrificing order and cleanliness.’ He grumbled. His forearm covered his face. It was funny, I could see him and he couldn’t see me. I was like a patron at an art gallery. I’ve never been to an art gallery, actually; I’ve heard they’re all rubbish plain white bullshit, now. That’s what Mello says: art in America is plain white bullshit, contemparary nonsense, and art’s a waste of time unless it’s good, which most of it isn’t. Go look at Salvador Dali if you want art, look at the face of God. He hadn’t been adressing me specifially when he’d said that, he’d been ranting about something, about people’s insatiable lust for new content and our fast culture and false idols and shit. But I’ll never look at a Salvador Dali, so I take what I can get.

 

I shucked my pajamas and left them at our feet. I’d never been so fucking hot. ‘Can we get fans tomorrow? I feel like I’m already in Hell.’

 

‘Maybe a bed.’ Mello said.

 

‘Sure.’

 

I lay next to him with my arm over his chest, but no closer. I was put off by the heat and the sweat I was already wearing. I was tired, he was tired. I just wanted to be tired next to each other. He put his fingers on the back of my neck and drew lines around the first bump of spine.

 

‘We didn’t pray over our food.’ He said, after a moment of sweltering silence.

 

‘We can pray now, if you want.’

 

Mello clasped my hand. ‘Lord God, I pray that the temperature drops during the night, and I pray that Matt and I christen this ugly house by fucking in the shower tomorrow morning. Amen.’

 

‘Huh.’ I said. ‘Amen.’

 

Mello snorted. ‘We need a coffee maker.’

 

‘A TV would be good.’

 

‘I’ll buy a new bike; we have a parking space.’

 

‘Can I get a car?’

 

‘Why not? And you need a cellphone.’

 

I nodded. I didn’t close my eyes until it was dark, but even then I could see Mello and the outline of the light switch and all my shit strewn across the room, and his black feathery coat over the window blocking half the moon. I slept like a dead dog, even though the carpet was hard on my hips and scratchy on my arms. I slept through the sunrise, through the beeping on the microwave while Mello heated his gas station coffee, and was half asleep while he talked to his mum on the phone. I didn’t struggle too bad with jet lag, because I was used to staying up on an odd schedule and taking long naps, and I just continued that trend in L.A. since it didn’t really matter when I was up since I had no job. Mello was obviously not entirely human because he never mentioned the time change at all.

 

That first day was pretty fun. We went out to eat at a diner and shared an American style plate of eggs and pancakes. I started smoking cigarettes you didn’t have to roll yourself because it was more convienent and I could afford it and whatever – switched to unfiltered Camels. As if it matters.

 

We bought an old classic car instead of renting one, paid for it on Mello’s card after a good bit of haggling during which Mello got up in some poor guy’s face. We were lucky he didn’t call the cops on us, I think, because Mello was wearing his gun prominently now, out in the open like a threat and the way he talked to people was downright unsafe. He was so obviously a gangster I was on the tips of my toes ready to run if I heard sirens, but Mello didn’t seem to give a shit. He was like a peacock in a pool of ducks. Anyway, that was how I got my car, he gave it to me – threw the keys at me, actually, and I dropped them and had to fish them out from under the car on my hands and knees when they bounced off the toe of my shoe.

 

Even after the haggling, it was an expensive car. It had a billion miles on it, but it was so fucking pretty. I basically love my car. If I didn’t owe Mello my life before, I did now.

 

Then the curtains went up on our windows, a mattress was delivered and plunked on the floor in the bedroom, Mello bought a giant cross to hang over the armchair he got for the living room, and my TV got plugged in, all while our new fan whirred from the corner of the living room. It was great. It was like a dream. We also fucked in the shower, after Mello was done complaining about the rust around the drain and writing a list of cleaning supplies to pick up from the Walmart.

 

Best, I got a laptop and we had Internet. While Mello made rice and peas in the kitchen, I sat with my legs out, logging into all my accounts.

 

‘I was thinking it would be helpful if you worked on filling in some gaps for me.’ Mello said, when he was finished in the kitchen and came to sit cross legged next to me, chopsticks and bowls in hand. ‘I have a list of names.’

 

‘Cool.’ I kissed him on the corner of his mouth.

 

‘I’m leaving tomorrrow to meet some people.’

 

‘Ok. I could really fill some gaps if I had a Playstation.’

 

Mello huffed, which was what his laugh usually sounded like, as far as I’d ever heard. ‘Write me a list of things you need and I’ll do what I can.’

 

‘If I’d known that was an option I’d have asked for a Bugatti.’

 

‘Are you a golddigger now?’

 

‘I don’t know. Do golddiggers get Bugattis?’

 

‘You already have a 50,000$ car, so it’s not a stretch.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe you should have spoken up at the dealership.’

 

‘Uhuh. Fuck off.’ Anyway, I was joking. My car was irreplaceable, emotionally. I know, I’d had it all of a day. Still.

 

‘I want you to stay quiet in here, Matt.’ Mello said.

 

‘Quiet, like, no loud music quiet? Or like... you think there are snipers on a roof somewhere pointing at us quiet?’

 

He looked exasperated. It was funny to look at him when he was relaxed, just sitting on the floor of our place having dinner with me in his expensive leather clothes and his gun a suggestive bulge in his pants. ‘I don’t want anyone to know _I’m_ here and _you’re_ here with me. So lay low.’

 

‘Sure.’

 

‘Good. No one needs to find us here.’

 

‘Especially not the snipers.’

 

‘Listen, Matt. I’m not a Soldier. It’s not out of the question.’

 

‘Oh, ok.’

 

It was another good night. I smoked a bowl after dinner while Mello flicked through channels on the television and played with my hair. We tried something where I kissed his boots and called him _Boss_ that felt like another of those things that was too real for him, but I could brush that off. Of course I already knew he was some genre of bigshot, and apparently an ambitious one. I was sure he was some sort of cold blooded killer. It didn’t matter. He was Mello in our apartment, we lived together and he was beautiful and I loved him and I liked his mum and and and, you get the picture.

 

Right, so, a month passed, and we really settled. I started helping him by finding people for him, and then by reviewing tapes and watching security cameras, and more and more shit that was really illegal and definitely mob-related. I got entrenched in the lifestyle pretty fast because I had a knack for it. Mello didn’t want me to, but he must have had a Boss who did because I did one job and then did 10 and then I had jobs all the time. I was actually so good at it I had to meet some of Mello’s people, and we went to a party type of thing in a basement room full of whores and guns; a total eyeful.

 

There were some pretty cool guys there who tried to let me pick a gun – I was aiming for an MMR, because it was wicked and those long guns are sweet as, I think I’d look proper badass with one of those things in the front seat, driving around in my Chevy – but everyone backed off me when Mello started going off about how I wasn’t theirs to arm and I would never need a gun because I wasn’t in the field and if anyone touched me he’d already have their arm blown off, and suddenly it was like I had a contagious wart because people tried not to look at me long enough to catch my eye.

 

I sat alone on a red couch while a nearby girl took her top off, under the watchful side-eye of Mello who was talking to a dude in a suit, when my cellphone rang. It was Marina. I hadn’t talked to her since the airport, but I knew Mello had given her my number for emergencies, and vice-versa.

 

‘Yeah?’ I said, over the pulsating beat of the stereo.

 

‘Hello, Matt. It is Marina.’

 

‘Yeah. Hey. What’s up?’

 

‘I will speak to you. Do you have time to talk?’

 

Seeing as everyone was treating me like I had the plague, I reckoned I did. ‘Sure. One sec.’ I stood, waved Mello down when he jerked a little bit in my direction.

 

There was a bathroom down an industrial looking hallway. The music disappeared for the most part when I clicked the door shut behind me. I jumped up onto the sink and made myself comfortable. ‘Ok, I’m... what’s up?’

 

Marina had been silent, and then she took a big breath. It gave me enough time to start having a panic attack about what she was about to say. ‘I want to know,’ Breath. ‘why have you let Mello run away to America, and having all these ideas? I don’t understand it. Why are you letting him be...’ Breath. ‘How do you _dare_?’

 

‘Um. I don’t know what... you mean.’ I said. Whatever I was being accused of, I already had being ashamed covered. I cannot handle being called out. My face felt real hot. I was glad I’d escaped to the bathroom. ‘Sorry, though.’

 

‘How do you mean you _do not know_? It’s not possible you _do_ _no_ _t know_.’ Mello had obviously gotten his angry voice from his mum, because they yelled the same.

 

‘Could you maybe explain?’ I mumbled, kicking at the porcelain neck of the sink.

 

‘My Mihael,’ Marina breathed, sounding distraught, ‘he tells me he is in America exorcising demons.’

 

‘Oh.’ I said. ‘Yeah, I guess he’s trying to do a bit of that.’

 

‘He leaves his home, he lies to me about where he is going, he says he is getting help but he is getting worse, alone.’ Marina paused. ‘But he is not alone. He is with _you._ I am thinking he is always with you.’

 

‘Oh.’

 

‘What do you say?’ She pushed. ‘Tell me what you say.’

 

‘I don’t know what you’re... I still don’t think I understand.’ But I did. I understood. She was telling me that Mello was mentally ill or something, and she thought I was enabling him in not getting help. I’d kinda known I’d been doing that, enabling him, I just hadn’t chosen to acknowledge the implications of that. I guess I hadn’t cared, which felt shitty to realise about myself. I guess I’d thought we were both a little bit odd so it was ok, and he was so religious, his demons and shit... he had a whole church backing him up about the demons. Tons of people believed in them, like The Exorcist is a _super_ popular movie and it’s about demons, so it’s not like it was that weird. Also I was playing dumb. I was playing dumb so I could stay in Mello’s good books and not have to be the one to tell him he was just delusional and nothing he said made any sense and I didn’t believe jack that he’d ever said about the demons. I’d tried not to confront him too much on purpose, hoped it would never catch up with me. I knew he was wrong about Near. We’d had that talk. I’d come to America knowing Mello thought Near was in New York being L, even though he was obviously just a normal dude living a regular life in Oxford and L was L and Kira was a maniac, not a satanist with demonic powers who needed Mello to shoot him with the gun he’d wrapped a rosary around and prayed over while he sat in the armchair in our new living room. I’d admitted to myself that I was willing to play pretend just to have the life I wanted with Mello, and then I’d done just that. I’d done it on purpose. I’d dared to do it. How? By being a selfish jerk, by lying to myself, by letting Mello tell me to shut up and go along with his plans.

 

‘He tells me he won’t talk to me because maybe I am not really his mama, maybe I am spy.’ Marina sounded less angry and more hysterical now, ‘I am trying to thwart his work, he says, because I tell him to come home and stop with nonsense. He sends me money and that is all, he says to me, he will not hear me denounce him. _My_ son. _My son!_ ’

 

I’d never heard her dissolve like that before. They must have had this conversation recently. ‘You don’t believe in demons?’ I asked, softly. ‘At all?’

 

‘No, no, Mihael’s demons are _inside_. Matt, please, please. Bring him home. Please, bring him home so we can help him. Bring him back to his family and his church.’

 

It was so weird having the rythm of my little life interrupted by someone who was so upset they couldn’t articulate it about something so big it was inexplicable, probably, anyway. I couldn’t wrap my head around that level of shit. I had decided about halfway through her spiel that I was helpless to change the way things were going, though, and I wasn’t going to try. Horrible, yeah? I’d decided that because I didn’t want Mello to dump me “because I was trying to thwart his work” or whatever. I wasn’t gonna be someone who “denounced” him and got left in the dirt with a fistful of shut up money and broken heart. I’m such a loyal bastard. ‘I love him.’ I told Marina, like a platitude, hiding my eyes in my hand. ‘ _I love him_.’

 

She cried, and cried, and I realised we weren’t going to talk anymore, we were just going to cry at each other, so I hung up. I felt so bad deep in my gut that it made me nauseous and I wanted to claw my skin off. I’d been waiting to mourn my cousin and suddenly I did, I don’t know why. I hyperventilated a bit. When I was done, I washed my face in the sink and I think I’d been huffing and sobbing like a fucking banshee for an hour. There was gonna be a new rumour that this bathroom had a whingy ghost. It was so absurd. An hour before I’d been trying to convince some people to give me a fucking MMR, a gun bigger than my goddamn arm, so I could shoot Mello’s stupid fucking fake demons with him, and I’d been so fucking uppity and jovial about it even though it was bullshit, evil bullshit, and now I was trying to console myself alone in the bathroom, as if I was actually _surprised_ that this was all an insane fantasy but with conseqeuences.

 

In America, they’ve got this thing called freedom of religion. I had that thought while I walked back to the mafia party, just that thought, drifting alone. They’ve got freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. I didn’t think about it much more than that, it was all I could muster as far as excuses go. And anyway I had told Mello I was with him. I’d known what I was saying and I’d meant it. This was the bed I’d made.

 

I was with him.

 

The party was still going. I sat back down on the couch next the topless girl, who offered me a bump of her coke. I was in a ‘fuck it’ sort of mood, sort of wanted to play fast and loose with something, so I just did cocaine with this chick on the red couch. Mello had noticed my absence and came over to ask me what I’d been doing when I’d come in the door from the bathroom, and I just shrugged and said I was fine until he gave up and left me to my shit.

 

The girl asked me why I was there, and I said I was a hacker, and she was like, ‘there are no hackers here,’ with a cheeky smile.

 

‘Who’s here then?’ I asked.

 

‘Importent men and their bitches.’ She said.

 

‘Guess I’m important then.’

 

She smiled wider. ‘You must be very important, little hacker boy I never saw before.’

 

I looked around. People were talking, mostly standing. Some of the guys had girls on their hips. Most of the girls were sitting around, drinking, talking, like us. ‘Oh, ok.’ I said, getting it. ‘I get it. You’re funny.’

 

‘I am pretty funny. Do you want to hear a joke?’

 

I shrugged. I really wanted to chainsmoke, so I pulled out three cigarettes. ‘Want one?’

 

She nodded. ‘What does the Mafia and pussy licking have in common?’

 

‘Dunno.’

 

‘One slip of the tongue and you’re in shit.’

 

‘Huh.’ I said.

 

‘Funny?’

 

‘Topical.’ I decided.

 

She offered her hand, and I noticed that one of her fingers was really seriously crooked, broken. ‘I’m Valentina.’

 

I took her hand gently, and she snatched me up and kissed my knuckle. ‘I’m Matt.’ I stuttered out. ‘Why are you women always kissers?’

 

‘What?’ She laughed.

 

I shrugged. ‘I’ve just been meeting a lot of touchy people.’ Actually, I’d properly met two people in the past, like, year. Marina and Valentina.

 

‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ She said.

 

‘I’m not sure.’ I said, honestly. ‘Do you know this bunch pretty well?’

 

She nodded, and pointed a long painted fingernail at a massive man who was leaning against the same table as Mello. ‘Don Rod.’

 

I whistled. ‘That’s more important than I was expecting.’

 

‘Oh? You’re new?’

 

‘I guess.’

 

She patted my knee a couple times, the way someone might reassure a dog or something. ‘That’s Mello.’

 

‘Yeah, I know him.’

 

‘Oh ho. You know him.’ She wiggled her eyebrows. ‘He’s -’ She whistled, the way I had when she’d told me the fucking Don of the Mafia was standing a few feet away from us.

 

‘Don’t flatter him too much.’ I said.

 

She laughed again. ‘I’m not.’

 

She grabbed a passing girl by the wrist and asked for martinis, which the girl brought back for us real snappy, which made me think Valentina might be pretty important herself, in some way.

 

‘To us.’ She said, clinking our glasses. ‘It’s vodka.’

 

‘I thought martinis were gin.’ When I sipped it, it was definitely vodka and soda.

 

‘Oh, I ask for a martini when I want this.’ Valentina explained nonsensically. ‘I hate gin.’

 

‘Cool. Sure.’

 

The music had been turned up. It beat hard. I sat back in the couch and listened to Valentina name all the mobsters and all the girls. She was full of gossip.

 

Mello came to see me after I’d heard what I was pretty sure was Valentina’s tight five, a whole wack of stories about a girl who’d been a drug mule who was sitting well out of earshot but which were still delivered via harsh whispering behind one of Valentina’s hands, and we’d done another few lines just because, I guess. Never shy, he grabbed me by the back of the head and kissed me hard.

 

‘We’re leaving.’ He said, when his tongue was out of my throat.

 

‘Ok.’

 

Valentina waved at me when I turned back to nod at her, her lips pursed – she was obviously whistling. I couldn’t hear it over the bass, but I shook my head at her like we were kids trying to have a secret conversation in class.

 

God, I was tired. I wrapped my arms around Mello’s waist and closed my eyes against his back on the ride home and shuffled up the stairs to our flat with my head down, crashing.

 

‘Looked like you were having fun.’ Mello said to my back while I beelined for the bedroom.

 

‘Weird night.’ I mumbled.

 

He started the meticulous process of removing his complicated outfit while I got comfortable under the thin white sheet we used as a blanket.

 

‘Are you sleeping in your jeans?’ Mello asked.

 

‘Mhm.’

 

He crawled over the sheet, put his hands on either side of my head. ‘Do you need help?’

 

‘If you want.’

 

‘I think I do.’

 

I pretended to be asleep for a while so he could undress me and I didn’t have to act any sort of way, I was really not present enough to mess about, and then said ‘are you some sort of exhibitionist or something?’

 

He settled in next to me. ‘Why would you say that?’

 

‘Experience and observation.’

 

‘Maybe I’m just not ashamed of you. Think of that, Matt?’

 

‘No.’

 

I’ve never fallen asleep so conflicted or so exhausted, and I’ve pulled a shitton of all nighters and once tried to stay up for 5 days to pretty good success just to see if I could. It was like my heart was light and my stomach was a hard coal and my limbs were limp, and I wanted Mello to tell me he wasn’t ashamed of me again and again.

 

Mello never went to church in L.A., but he did observe the Sabbath by sleeping in with me, so I could wake up and see him there. He got worse and worse at taking a break from his work, started sneaking things in like phone calls and minor pickup jobs on his days off, but we kept our heads on the pillow until noon on Sundays at least, sometimes talking if I was awake, me complaining about the light through the window, having my first smoke of the day while he ate Nutella out of the container he kept in a drawer in his nightstand, the weirdo. If he wasn’t still writing nightly in his demon research journals and collecting rosaries like a kid with tamagotchis I’d have thought his faith was slipping. Maybe it was. Maybe his faith was slipping but his mind was slipping, too, and this conflict of behaviour was what that looked like. I wasn’t about to upset the balance and ask him if he still even believed in the Catholic tenants and the God that wrote them.

 

I guess looking for Kira was doing some good in the world. The guy’s killcount was always rising. There were people who thought he was alright, seeing as his victims probably should have been in prison, but I still think it was right to take him down. If you believed in letting randos be judge and executioner in trials without a jury you might disagree, but obviously Mello didn’t; maybe because he fit the profile for the sort of people Kira liked to off or maybe because of morality (a stretch, I think) or maybe because his deluded hang-ups had led him to arbitrarily choosing a villain to play his antagonist in the story he was crafting. Whatever it was that drove him truly I couldn’t know because, like I said, I was keeping questions out of my mouth so I could keep Mello in my life.

 

I did background checks on a bunch of Japanese people – this is where I learnt Japanese on a fast track: Hiragana in a day, Katakana the next day, and Mello constantly hounding me about grammar. Pretty quick I could read shit like ‘Four dead in violent home invasion’, but then one day when Mello tried to ask me how I was doing all I could come up with was ‘Uh... The crime rates have been rising, causing anxiety worldwide. I, uh, grieve for our past?’ because at least that had a feelings-related phrase so it was sort of relevant and I wasn’t sure how I was doing anyway, so I just blurted out the last thing I’d read in an editorial about some broad’s opinion about Kira’s influence on society. I was really good at memorising stuff but not that good at making it seem natural, so I was never a conversationalist even though I felt fluent enough to do decent work. Good thing I never needed to order a burger, because I don’t even know the word for ‘tomatoes’ to ask for none, since I don’t like them.

 

I was doing most of the house-related running around, probably because I was always going to the store for cigarettes. I got to know the city pretty well. Spent a lot of time learning how to drive doing doughnuts in the parking lot across the street. Mello hooked me up with a fake license, but it would suck to get pulled over for dangerous driving of the “didn’t shoulder check and nailed a cyclist” variety. I guess when I put my mind to it I can actually learn shit pretty fast and good.

 

L.A. wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, really. By Christmas I hated it the way siblings hate each other, affectionately. I was starting to think I could get used to it.

 

I even liked the people, sort of. Not that I talked to them. They just seemed ok. There was a girl who walked her dog every day at about the time when I leant out the window to look at the cloudless sky for my smoke break, talking on the phone and having loud conversations with various people about various other people, like a soap opera I kind of looked forward to. Sometimes she waved at me if she spotted me and I waved back. Sometimes the neighbours had little parties and we could hear their music. It bothered Mello, he always banged on the walls and made sure we were unpopular with everyone else our age in the complex. Whatever.

 

For Christmas we ate turkey and cranberry sauce and melted cheese and shit, and drank ciders on our little balcony, looking out at the city. It had been an age since I’d celebrated a Holiday. Mello talked about Jesus a bit, about the nativity and the King who wanted to kill babies. It was about as interesting as a Prime Time re-run since I already knew the general gist of it.

 

‘I should have bought sparkling wine.’ He groused.

 

‘Still time.’

 

The night was bright with fireworks and lights. We hadn’t decorated other than buying a big red poinsetta for the kitchen counter. It was pagan to put up a tree, apparently. I think Mello just didn’t want to go through the effort because I’d never heard of anyone getting pissy about trees. He didn’t need Holiday rituals, apparently. Neither did I, so whatever.

 

‘Let’s go, then.’ Mello decided, standing up smoothly. He was wearing his hair choppy, now, over his eyes more. He told me long hair on men is an abomination before God but he wasn’t changing it and his mum had liked it that way, too. Hypocritical religion is common practise, he said, it’s expected and normal for man to sin, God’s Heaven would be empty if it wasn’t for confession. It kinda amused me that Jesus died so Mello could have long hair.

 

We bought the bubbly from the liquor store with the fake I.D.s we needed to do anything in America with it’s dumb age restrictions, swapped Happy Christmases with the cashier, and then just drank it on the hood of my car on the side of the road in front of a really nicely decorated house in a good area, a sort of festive tourism.

 

‘Mother will be at Mass.’ Mello said. She wouldn’t be, because of the time difference, but he was obviously not thinking about that, which was fair. ‘She’ll have incense burning in the house. She always liked to do that. I wonder if she cooked.’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

He was nostalgic, full of good memories. The mention of Marina just made me sick. He’d chosen to cut her off, and here he was loving her and missing her. He didn’t know I’d talked to her. She said he’d told her he didn’t trust that she was really herself. Did he think there was a chance demons were communicating to him over the phone, masquerading as his mum? To trick him? Or was she possessed, now? It would have to be something like that, I thought. He’d chosen this over her. It was good for me that he did that, she’d have had him married with kids or something, going to University where I couldn’t follow, if she had her way. He’d be halfway through with a degree in something useful, maybe more than that with his work ethic, maybe he’d be a decorated scholar or a librarian, dunno. What was best for him? I _can_ _’t_ know. It was all just fucked up. I’d already chosen what I thought was best for me, anyway. I was invested in this version of our lives, the one where I let someone I loved go through a psychotic break so I wouldn’t have to do a difficult thing for once in my lazy-ass life.

 

By summer Mello’s demons had physical forms - there was a backstory that he let me in on with more confidence and more details since I was nodding along all the time, encouraging him to tell me his private thoughts. It was a story as interesting as a bible tale; Mello told me these things in the same stage voice. Kira had summoned a beasty from Hell to stroke his ego and off people he didn’t like, and then the calibre of crime had swelled with the sense of self-importance. L had been killed by the demon. Near knew about the occult aspect of the case, but he wasn’t equipped with the prowess which God had personally bestowed on Mello. Mello had to beat him, at something more important than High School. The news on TV was directed at Mello personally, a lot of the time. Reporters told him secret messages which he wrote in the journal and were sometimes super odd, like about other demons, satanists in cahoots with Kira, conspiracy stuff. Everything was about Kira. If a guy fell off a building downtown, it was because Kira something something.

 

We worked until November, a full year in L.A. Mello was in an accident and spent some time in the hospital getting skin grafts and I sat in a chair with my eyes red and my head back, looking at the white ceiling. He ate a lot of Jello-O and I read from the Bible while he breathed with an IV in his arm and his heartbeat on a screen next to us, evidence of life. My feelings for him stopped changing. I love him like a man – I mean, I love him flawed and I love him scarred and I didn’t need to put him on a pedestal to love him, I love him low. I held his hand in mine like we were really just a normal couple going through a regular old bad time. I liked the part of his hospitilization when he was asleep, healing, and nurses would ask how long we’d been together and I could say ‘Uh, wow – a long time, now. Since I was 17 and I’m 20 now.’ I liked saying that. I liked saying ‘3 years, now. Yeah.’ When they said I was devoted, I liked to hear it and nod and think about how I would do anything to stay devoted, even shitty things, and it was sick how that just made me proud of myself. There’s a school of thought where you measure love by how willing you are to let someone go, to see them be happy without you. But what about me, then, huh? I wasn’t strong enough for that sort of selfless bull. I slept in the hospital; they let me. I postured a little and read aloud to him when he was sleeping while the nurse bustled around; I liked outside acknowledgement of my outstanding obsession. I was almost thinking, like, do other people do this? Do they? I would jump off this building right now for him. Who else would do that? Look at me, I’m in love! I’m not alone! I took the elevator down 5 floors to smoke 20 feet away from the building and that was a sacrifice, too, I hate elevators. I’m a martyr for love! And you’ve seen nothing yet, just wait until I get into the real shit.

 

There was a reporter who Mello decided worked for Kira – she was delivering messages in code to him, and Mello was able to decipher them and put them in his journals. He watched her show every evening in rapture. He had a big scar, now. His hair was getting messier and his eyes were getting more... seedy. He didn’t focus well. He sort of swivelled about and could be jumpy. I started to wonder if he was hearing things, sometimes, and keeping it bottled up. He came home once with blood under his fingernails, which was just uncharacteristically sloppy.

 

‘Scratching backs?’ I asked, jokingly, kissing him sideways while he washed his hands.

 

‘Something like that.’ He answered. ‘Nothing too gruesome.’

 

‘Whatever.’ I said, to show him I was cool. He tried to keep me seperate from the rest of his life. Even Kira. I was in the loop but he didn’t make me part of it. It was a kindness he was doing me. Even psycho he was taking care, I thought.

 

‘I have to talk to you about something.’ He said while he dried his eyes.

 

‘Ok.’

 

‘I have a mole with the Task Force. I think I’ve got enough info that you could get in.’

 

‘Sure. I’ll do that.’

 

He nodded. I settled on the couch with my laptop to get a start on it while he made dinner. The SPK was just the police, police working with L. It wasn’t Near. I wondered if he’d seen that Near wasn’t part of the group and how he’d explained it away – or, how his brain had done it for him, I guess.

 

‘How long?’ He asked. He’d made a big bowl of salad and corn on the cob.

 

I took a corn and chewed on it a little. ‘I’ll stay up.’

 

‘Good.’

 

His newscaster was on. He prayed after her show was over and turned the TV off. I’d been half paying attention, half looking for something I could do about this SPK thing. It ended up taking me a long time to get in, which was for the best, looking back. We had an extra week together because the security around the Task Force was so tight.

 

But that was how we found Kira. The SPK had a name. They were waiting to make an arrest, on pause while the beauraucrocacy and logistics worked out, waiting until they were sure and they could get him good.

 

‘You’ll like this.’ I said smugly on January 18th 2010\. I had a picture of Kira in highschool up on my laptop, a normal looking guy. Good grades, just like Mello. Valedictorian.

 

Mello stared with his bug eyes, bent at the waist over the back of the couch. ‘No shit.’ He murmured against my ear.

 

‘Found him.’ I said. ‘We actually did it.’

 

Really, the SPK had found him. But we knew about Light Yagami before anyone else did, before he’d been apprehended. He was somewhere out there, free and murderous. He was kinda good looking. I found pictures of his sister and his dad, too. Nice family.

 

Mello kissed my cheek and swung his arms around my neck. ‘Thank God. Thank Christ.’

 

 _Thank Matt_ , I thought.

 

And I thought it was over. I thought the SPK would arrest Kira and Mello would have to see him go to jail and get sentenced and he’d have no access to him, and maybe the delusions would go away on their own or maybe then I could try to get him help and be a good person for once; maybe, in the wake of this victory of negligence and dumb luck over logic and good decisions, I could fight through whatever made me so complacent and I could make something right. Or maybe we could just keep riding the wave of it all, safer because he wasn’t actively seeking out a face-off with a dangerous serial killer. Whatever the next step, I felt like I’d come up from deep underwater to take a big, clarifying breath. Things would get better for both of us, now.

 

But then Mello beat me over the head with the reality of his enthusiasm and told me, while we were sitting up in bed the next morning eating cold faery toast, that we had better go get Kira before Near did so we could end it properly.

 

‘We’re down to the wire now, Matt.’ He said. ‘We make our move as soon as possible.’

 

Hello, anchor on my ankle, again.

 

‘I can have him by next week, Matt.’ He said. ‘We can take a stand against the devil’s schemes.’

 

‘Oh yeah. I remember that verse.’ I reached across Mello’s bare stomach to put my bit of toast on the bedside table. ‘Are you sure we’re ready for that?’

 

‘We’ll be ready.’

 

‘It’s just... a big ask.’ I was trying to sound flippant. ‘Not that I don’t think you can do it or something.’

 

Mello’s eyes narrowed. The fever was in them. ‘We are hard pressed on every side.’ Mello said. ‘We may be struck down, but not destroyed.’

 

‘That from the Bible, too?’

 

‘Yes. The Lord says: be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid.

 

‘Hm.’ I wanted him to pray that we fuck in the shower. This was the depressing stuff, now; I liked the jokes. Marina believed in Romans. Mello seemed to prefer all the shit in the Bible that was dark and bad. ‘I guess that’s... comforting.’ If you liked being struck down, maybe. ‘What are you thinking of doing, anyway?’

 

Mello nodded. ‘I’ll fill you in, Matt.’

 

‘Sure.’

 

‘8 days, I think.’ He said.

 

‘Wow.’

 

I always thought it was kinda hot that he wore that long chain against his sternum even when he was stripped down, red beads like drops of blood and the cold cross. Dunno why. He would grab it and spin the beads, sometimes. It was something to look at when my eyes were tired and I was squinting in the sunlight. He would mutter when he did it, and that was what he started to do then. I had no appetite left. I wanted him to be praying that we fuck in the shower so bad.

 

‘Hey, Mello?’ I asked, after he’d been quiet a while. ‘Could you tell me your sins?’

 

‘Why?’

 

‘Just curious.’

 

He twisted his mouth. ‘I don’t know, Matt. I haven’t confessed in a long time.’

 

‘Yeah. It’s a sin not to do that, isn’t it?’

 

‘To some extent, yes.’

 

‘Mm. Think you’ll go to Heaven?’

 

He stared at the wall, beads between thumb and forefinger. ‘I made a choice a long time, ago, Matt, to enjoy my time on Earth.’

 

‘And are you enjoying it?’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘Yeah, same.’

 

So. On Monday he explained the plan. It was really stupid because it would accomplish nothing and prove nothing to someone who wasn’t paying attention and it wouldn’t matter in the long run to Kira or to the world. That was immediately obvious to me, because Mello’s plan involved me driving through back steets in the shape of some runes or something on a route that he’d marked out on Google Maps, with my car full of weapons, and then shooting some innocent people while he kidnapped a woman who had nothing to do with anything in broad daylight. It was highly likely there would be cameras rolling at the time. I saw the plan and listened to the twisted logic and immediately felt my nostrils flare the way they do when I really don’t want to make a face. It was something I did a lot with Mello, fought to just nod neutrally along. It was either a suicide mission or a good way to go to jail. I’m at least looking at like, manslaughter charges. Murder in the 1st degree though, probably. Life in prison or I get shot by the body guards around this poor woman. So yeah. Yeah. Fuck.

 

We had a good run, though.

 

And I guess I could call someone. I could call Marina but I don’t want to hear her cry and I don’t want her to hate me to my face and I don’t want to hear a lecture about my mistakes. I don’t have to help him, techincally. I could leave, and then what? Die of lung cancer like my dad in a crappy hole somewhere alone. America’s full of shoddy diners where I could take orders.

 

I think we all know I won’t do any of that. Walk out of this apartment and leave Mello behind me? Shit no. I’ve already come this far, and I said I was with him and I really mean that. To the end. At this point I deserve it. I seriously deserve it.

 

God at some point actually said ‘if we die, we die’. He did. Look it up. It’s in the Bible. I'm taking it out of context, sure, but that’s the part I like, so screw the context. It makes it better, I think, thinking that Mello's precious Bible doesn’t give a shit about us, either. It’s not just me who’s shrugging and saying ‘fuck it!’ about all this – it’s God! That’s one thing I can say about Mello’s method, the trick he pulled again and again to construct the bullshit framework for the delusion that's probably going to kill us: pulling random shit from the Bible and pretending it applies to you personally is really easy and pretty validating.

 

Yeah.

 

If we die, we die.


End file.
